Worth excerpting from the Westpac survey this morning:
Sentiment around housing collapsed in April with assessments of both ‘time to buy’ and ‘price expectations’ plunging to the most negative levels since the GFC. The drop was consistent across all major states.
The ‘time to buy a dwelling’ index dropped 26.6% – the biggest monthly decline on record. That said, at 82, the index is still above the GFC low of 67.1 and previous cyclical lows in December 2003 (73.2), June 1989 (44.8) and September 1974 (61.5).
Consumer expectations for house prices fell even more sharply. The Westpac-Melbourne Institute Index of House Price Expectations Index dropped by over half (–50.8%) to just 69.7 in April. While this measure has a much shorter survey history, the fall is nearly four times bigger than the largest monthly decline since we started running the question regularly in 2009. Responses to a similar survey run prior to 2009 suggest the index level in April 2020 is comparable to the weakest reads seen during the GFC.
I’ve adjusted a couple of January Westpac charts for perspective:
House price crash.
