Big offshore portfolio managers with billions of capital invested in Australian residential mortgages have become concerned about an Australian property market crash, The Australian Financial Review reports.
According to the newspaper, Threadneedle Asset Management investment manager Henry Cooke said fund managers in Britain were spending a lot of time analysing whether Australia was experiencing a housing bubble.
“That’s the sector everyone outside Australia wants to know about,” Mr Cooke told an Australian Securitisation Forum conference, the AFR reports.
“My concern is if you start to see a downturn in the economy ... foreign investors start to get nervous.”
However Mr Cooke and other offshore fund managers at the conference, who are investing in home loans issued by Australian banks, were cautiously optimistic Australia would avoid the kind of crash seen in places like the United States, the AFR reports.