Real Estate – Financially Wise

Jobs and growth – the myth

Unless you’ve been stranded on a desert island (we should all be so lucky), you will undoubtedly have heard the term “jobs and growth” bandied about the place as the federal election draws near.

All sides of politics like to promise jobs and economic growth. People are generally reassured if they think that there will be jobs available for them and the economy is likely to grow.

But how realistic is this promise of job creation and economic growth?

Let’s look at jobs first. Governments don’t create jobs. Businesses do. And no, creating more government jobs is not job creation. At best, governments can foster an environment that is conducive for businesses to create jobs.

Large infrastructure projects, even if they are public and private partnerships, are also not really job creators. These usually have a limited lifespan and do not create jobs for the long term. Once a project is finished, there are no ongoing jobs.

Compounding this is the fact that the whole jobs landscape is changing. Jobs are becoming more transient. Employers find they only need people for shorter periods and outsourcing has also changed the job environment. Businesses would rather put on casual or part time people than a full time person as it makes it easier to manage changing workloads. But this makes it harder for people looking for work and increases underemployment, something not being addressed by governments.

The nature of knowledge is also changing within the jobs framework. The amount of information in the world now is doubling every 18 months. To put that into perspective, 50 years ago, it took 25 years for information to double. It means that in some areas of knowledge, for a standard three year university degree there’s a distinct possibility that by the time the student graduates, what was taught and learnt in the first and possibly even the second year, is already obsolete. Many students will have degrees that are no longer useful by the time they graduate. There might not even be jobs in that industry. Our education system is not moving quickly enough to keep up with technological advances.

Experienced commentators and futurists are predicting that anywhere between 40 and 70 percent of jobs that exist today won’t exist in 10 years thanks to automation, artificial intelligence, robotics and virtual reality. It also means that there are new types of jobs being created now that didn’t exist a few years ago. Whoever heard of content marketers, social media engineers and virtual assistants until recently?

The focus needs to shift to entrepreneurism and innovation rather than the traditional job where a person works for someone else. People working for themselves, setting up micro or small businesses and solopreneurs are one of the few areas that is actually growing. Our education system needs to be more nimble and adaptable.

And then there’s economic growth. A growing economy is good for the country and the electorate, as this indicates economic stability, guaranteed jobs and other indicators like wage growth. However, realistically, governments can no more increase or create economic growth than they can create jobs, particularly in the current global economic climate.

Let us look at some reasons why this is the case.

Firstly, we are in a global slow growth environment. Most developed countries are experiencing their slowest growth in decades. We are entering a deflationary period where asset prices are falling. I believe we are reverting back to the mean, as discussed in this previous post.

Most countries have tried various stimulatory measures. Central bankers use monetary policy by altering interest rates. In the past few years, most have reduced official interest rates to record low levels. In some countries, such as those in Europe, the interest rate is effectively zero and in others, such as Japan, Switzerland and Sweden, they have negative interest rates. This has not worked in stimulating their economies.

Low interest rates are supposed encourage people and businesses to borrow more thereby increasing demand. But that will only work up to a point. Interest rates are now so low, that any person or company that has wanted to borrow has done so by now. Instead, many people are taking advantage of the low rates to reduce their debt levels.

Reducing interest rates has its biggest effect early in the cycle of rate reductions. Thanks to diminishing marginal returns, each subsequent rate cut has a lesser and shorter impact than those made earlier in the cycle. Eventually they have no impact at all. I believe we are already at this stage and this is particularly evident in countries with zero and negative interest rates.

People and businesses cannot be forced to borrow more, particularly when they are already up to their eyeballs in debt. Australia has one of the fastest growing debt levels and our borrowing is at record levels already.

Governments are also increasing public debt levels, and in many countries, a great deal of this debt is to meet welfare requirements. Hardly a productive use of money. This also affects a country’s credit rating and makes credit more expensive if and when they are downgraded.

In addition, low interest rates have the effect of reducing confidence in the economy. Interest rates are usually only dropped in difficult economic times, so continually dropping them sends the message to people and businesses that the economy is not well and there are bad times ahead. Subsequently buying and investing slows or stops altogether.

Also with every interest rate cut, people who rely on interest for income such as savers and self-funded retirees, earn less and so spend less in the economy as their income drops. It also makes it harder for those who are saving for things like house deposits who earn less on their savings, thus delaying their entry into the market.

Demand for things is also falling. Manufacturers and countries relying on export, such as China and Japan, are finding that there is less demand for their goods. This is partly because the weaker economy erodes confidence in the market, and people are concerned for their jobs. They therefore decide they don’t need as many “things” or “stuff”. Many countries, such as China, have invested massive (borrowed) amounts on increasing the capacity of their factories and manufacturing just as demand slowed. Many of these plants are now underutilised or sitting idle.

Governments also don’t like deflationary periods. It reflects badly on them and their policies if the economy does not grow under their stewardship. In order to try and stimulate their economies, governments will use fiscal policies, or government spending. This gives the illusion of growth through increasing GDP figures, but this is at best a short term solution and rarely leads to long term growth and employment. Running stimulus or quantitative easing programs, more commonly known as money printing, presumes the money created will make its way to the greater economy by trickling through the banks to people and businesses.

The trouble with these programs is that very little of the printed money has actually made its way into the real economy. Instead, most of it has stayed with the banks or gone to large companies where they have used the funds to buy back their own shares. This increases stock market prices, but has not made a direct contribution into the economy.

Asset prices, such as real estate and stocks have been artificially boosted by people and investment funds searching for any yields they can find because they get nothing from holding cash. Unfortunately these asset price rises have nothing to do with productivity increases.

As previously mentioned, this stimulation is increasingly done with borrowed money, as few countries now run surpluses. Public and private debt burdens keep increasing. Unfortunately, private debt is increasingly funnelled into unproductive endeavours and assets.

It doesn’t actually create jobs and has exponentially decreasing returns. In other words, it’s costing more money or debt, to create increasingly smaller returns. Where once every dollar invested might create greater returns than that initial dollar, now that invested dollar is returning less than the initial investment. These days the original dollar is debt, so we’re using more and more debt to create a lesser return.

This will ultimately create a drag on the economy and slow it down. We are already seeing the result of this with low growth, stagnating wages and low inflation and even deflation, because the economy is weighed down by this enormous unproductive debt hanging over it.

But the biggest reason for the low growth and slowdown in jobs is demographic change in developed countries. Almost all developed countries have smaller generations following the baby boomers. This means that the welfare and handouts that everyone has come expect as an entitled right may not be able to be funded, as the burden of paying for this falls on the next generation.

The Australian birth rate is below replacement at 1.8 children per couple. Our current immigration levels are enough to increase the population at this stage, but is this a sustainable model? It could be argued that the continent of Australia is not able to sustain the Big Australia vision of most of our politicians, given the vast interior of desert not suitable for agriculture and we are the second driest continent on the planet. Food and water security cannot be guaranteed.

Unfortunately our current and growing welfare requirements, demanded as a right rather than a privilege, depends on succeeding generations being larger than the preceding ones. Everybody wants the “free” education, “free” healthcare, disability allowances, faster broadband, greater pensions, stadiums and everything else expected to be provided by bigger and multiple levels of government. The trouble is nobody actually wants to pay for it. We all want someone else to pay. Obviously this is unsustainable, and was only ever really possible during the baby boom years.

So the bottom line is, in our current slowing productivity, slowing population and slowing credit environment, more jobs and economic growth are unlikely to happen without some forward and long term thinking by both politicians and the populace and real action taken now.

The gross misallocation of capital

Whether you participate in it or not, you cannot help but be aware of Australia’s real estate market, as there is always a lot of news about what happens in this market.

You might even think that all the most recent activity in real estate is a good thing. It’s building more homes for people and it’s employing people. That’s all good right?

The answer is a little bit more complex than that. Yes, a great deal of people is employed in the construction and real estate industry. This is encouraged by governments at all levels because firstly it generates income for them and it also gives the impression of economic activity. Local Councils receive income from increased rates and development fees. State governments receive stamp duties from property transfers. Federal governments can count construction as GDP activity and point to the number of people currently employed by the construction sector.

But, what exactly is real estate and property? At its most basic level, it is shelter, one of our fundamental needs. It’s up there with nutrition and hydration. On Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, safety (security) rates just under physiological (food, water) in order of importance.

Yet in Australia, it has become an asset class that relies on constant increases. Once upon a time, people held real estate for yield. Now they hold it for capital gain. And this has had a disastrous effect on households and our entire economy, particularly on our private debt levels.

People have bought into property in the expectation that property will always rise. This is not actually the case (see previous post). Constantly rising property prices are only a feature of the past 50 or so years, it’s not something that has happened consistently in the past. Not before credit and debt became the predominant measure of an economy’s growth anyway. This has benefitted property and associated industries greatly but at the expense of other more productive businesses.

To fully understand why all this investment in Australian property is not necessarily a good thing, it is first important to understand how a traditional business works.

A traditional business usually creates a good or service at a particular price, and then it sells it at a higher price that will hopefully include enough income to cover the cost of the original product or service, the associated expenses in creating this product or service, and profit. The whole business model implies trade, which has existed for many thousands of years.

If the business does not consistently generate a profit, it will eventually go out of business and cease to exist. Our federal governments rely on businesses making a profit as their revenues are reliant on taxes charged on this profit.

A very important component of a traditional business, from the largest multinationals to the smallest micro business, is that it also employs people in the foreseeable future as the business continues to create the product or service to sell to repeat or new customers. If it’s a good product, it potentially has the whole world as its market.

Now look at property and housing construction. A number of people are employed at the start of the housing construction, from architects to builders and all the services required to construct the dwelling. However, once the house is complete, there is no more ongoing employment on a regular basis.

If the dwelling is for investment, at best it may provide ongoing employment for a property manager. Yes, it will have the occasional need for a tradesperson, but not enough to keep them gainfully employed indefinitely. And of course a whole group of people won’t be employed at all if the investment property in question is an existing house rather than a new one requiring construction.

What’s important to realise is that property is a non-productive consumption item at the end of the day.

At this point in time, there are trillions of dollars tied up in Australian real estate. That is a lot of money to be tied up in what is essentially a consumption item that provides shelter, a basic human requirement, but does not provide ongoing jobs or employ people gainfully. You cannot keep on constructing buildings ad infinitum.

Granted, given our love affair with property, a number of complementary businesses have sprung up to provide various services, including real estate agents, property managers, buyer’s agents, investment and financial advisers, property commentators, educators and organisations that do nothing but provide property statistics, to name but a few. Yes, a whole industry has grown reliant on the property markets, particularly for investors.

There are also myriad property spruikers touting different ways of investing in property from property options, no money down deals, instalment contracts (rent to buy) to buying for development, all to try and get ever more productive dollars into this unproductive asset class.

However many of these businesses do not even add value to the basic product of property. They’re just another unneeded layer adding their percentage to the final price.

And with lowering interest rates, more people are being encouraged to put yet more borrowed funds into housing (as well of course, into other consumption items).

There’s an implacable belief by Australians that property doubles every seven to 10 years. It doesn’t.

This is coupled with the second belief that property always goes up. And once again, no it doesn’t.

Compounding the problem further, interest rates are being kept artificially low, ostensibly to stimulate demand and investment, but in reality causing ever more resources to pour into housing.

And to top it all off, there are the extraordinarily generous tax breaks given as a reward to people who make a loss on their investment. The most generous in the world in fact, by allowing the losses made on investment properties to be offset against ALL income, rather than just the income received from property. A tax break unavailable to other businesses.

I’m sorry, but isn’t the whole idea of investing to make money? Call it speculation or gambling, hoping that capital gain will put your investment in the black, but don’t call it investing. I call it the BHP strategy – buy property, hold it and pray that the prices will go up.

Of course, capital gain isn’t capital gain until it’s locked in, that is, the asset is sold and the value realised. After all, what goes up can also go down, but that’s a story for another post.

Are you starting to understand the case of gross misallocation of capital into a very unproductive area?

Instead these funds could be put to good use in real businesses creating real products and real wealth by providing a continuous stream of goods and services and continually employing people.

At the end of the day, real wealth can only be produced by real business creating a good or service. If too much wealth is created simply by virtue of capital gain, without any real labour or transformation of raw materials into a finished product, the economy is impacted and real wealth starts to disappear as wage growth slows. This benefits nobody but the owners of the property, at the expense of the real producers.

Eventually the economy stagnates as real productivity falls along with the aforementioned lack of wage growth and our standard of living drops.

We’re not going to create wealth if all we do is sell property to each other. That would indeed be a gross misallocation of capital of the highest order.

The Australian Housing Bubble

We, as Australians, seem to have developed a love affair with property over the past 40 plus years. Property has became an investment class rather than just a provider of shelter and the consumable item that it should be. A place to park wealth rather than used to create it. This continuously raises the possibility of a bubble.

There has been a lot said, many megabytes devoted to and much news ink used in commentary about a bubble in Australian housing.

People ask me if I think that Australian housing is in a bubble. I usually answer in the affirmative saying it’s looking very frothy and furthermore tell them that Australia’s and many of the world’s housing has existed in a bubble for the past 45 or so years.

I will get back to this in a moment, but first I’d like to say that just because Australian housing is in a bubble, does not mean that it cannot continue for a while longer, although I personally believe we are closer to the end point than the start point. As John Maynard Keynes supposedly noted, the market can remain irrational longer than we can remain solvent.

Now, a very quick history lesson on events that happened 45 or so years ago and why this has created numerous property bubbles in Australia and the world. In 1968 then US President Lyndon Johnson eliminated US dollar gold cover. That is, the US no longer had to have a percentage of gold in their reserves to cover each US dollar that was in existence. This was taken a step further in 1971 by the then US president Richard Nixon who suspended the US dollar’s convertibility into gold, which meant that a US dollar could no longer be exchanged for gold.

Prior to this, under the Bretton Woods agreement in 1944, the US dollar was backed by gold and by proxy, so were the world’s currencies as they were valued against the US dollar on the exchange rates.

When the gold link was severed, the world changed from a gold backed to a credit backed and driven economy. This meant the economy would only grow if credit was increasing, so people were greatly encouraged to accumulate more debt by governments and central bankers. Many people were happy to oblige.

Anybody who bought property in the past 45 or so years has been the beneficiary of this huge loosening of credit brought about by the actions of both Presidents Johnson and Nixon.

When looking at Australian house prices from about 1880 until late 1960’s/early 1970’s, prices were relatively flat, when adjusted for inflation. Once credit was loosened however, from the late 1960’s onward house prices went parabolic over and above the inflation rate. The gains seen over the past 45 or so years are a product of this huge credit expansion.

Pretty much anybody who purchased property in that time, benefitted from increasing values. With few exceptions, property prices generally went up far in excess of the inflation rate.

The people who benefitted from this windfall weren’t geniuses, they were just in the right place at the right time. But many thought they were, because they made money each time they sold property and because they didn’t understand the underlying parameters that allowed this to occur.

So the myth of property prices doubling every seven to 10 years was born. The fact that this had only happened over the past 45 or so years wasn’t recognised. “45 years” somehow became “always”.

There were even pretty graphs with a starting year point and an ending year point to support this property doubling “fact”, but once again, the data was extrapolated and prices averaged out over the time frame, rather than show actual annual prices for the period in question. And more often than not, these were not adjusted for inflation. As previously mentioned, inflation adjusted property prices stayed fairly flat until the late 1960’s. They certainly didn’t double, for example, from 1910 to 1920 or 1930 to 1940, but the graphs made it appear as though it did.

However, in the current environment of low inflation and low interest rates, property prices are now starting to pull back and I believe they are reverting back to the more normal mean of only increasing in line with inflation.

Changing demographics as baby boomers retire and change from spenders into savers, will impact on property prices as well, particularly when they start to sell their assets to fund their retirement. Not just prices for property, but shares and businesses as well.

Overbuilding of flats around Australia’s capital cities will also have a dampening effect on housing prices, particularly in attached dwellings. Real sustained property price corrections could happen as soon as the 2017-2018 financial year, if not sooner.

The way global economies are at the moment, there are no guarantees that prices will remain stable, let alone increase any time soon. And with the oversupply of flats coming into the market, most likely just as the global markets enter a serious downturn, falling real estate prices are a very real possibility, particularly from investors exiting the market. When they are not seeing any real capital gain (after inflation), have very low or no yields and longer vacancy periods, but still have to put their hand in their pocket every month for expenses, there could be a rush for the exits.

Real estate, after all, is a non-productive consumption item.

Prices may rise but people seem oblivious to the fact they can also fall. What goes up can also come down. So capital gain only really exists if it is realised. Unless capital gain is locked in (ie. sold at the highest valuation price), it’s not real capital gain. You cannot rely on the greater fool theory forever. This is the theory that a greater fool will come along and pay you more for your “asset” than you paid for it initially. The banks have been complicit in this, allowing borrowing against any increase in equity so the debt load is constantly increasing. This strategy is also pushed by property spruikers as a means of increasing your property portfolio.

Yes, a property investor might have a two million dollar property portfolio. But if it’s secured against a debt of $2.5 million thanks to falling property prices, that’s hardly a sound financial position to be in. If and when that happens, the friendly bank won’t be quite so friendly any more.

The problem is that, as previously mentioned, housing is a non-productive consumption item whose purpose is to provide shelter, but is being sold as an investment item reliant on capital gain to create wealth rather than yield to provide cash flow.

So, as well as property not doubling every seven to 10 years over a long period of time, Australian property prices can also actually fall. And this is even more likely at this particular juncture.

We are entering a deflationary period, a period of asset price falls. The reason the massive money printing or quantitative easing programs we have seen over the past few years by many countries have not succeeded in increasing asset prices consistently, kick starting the economy or causing massive inflation or even hyperinflation, is that this money printing has just stopped the deflationary forces from having their full effect. It’s why the global economy is sluggish at best. With the amount of money printing carried out by various governments, global economies should be booming. They are not.

Just as record low, and in some cases negative, interest rates have similarly been unsuccessful in getting the global economy moving.

There is a train of thought, particularly amongst politicians and central bankers that inflation is good and deflation is bad. But I disagree. Before the turn of the last century, (and incidentally before the proliferation of central banks), deflation was as much a part of an economy as inflation. Before the 1900’s, periods of inflation were generally always matched with periods of deflation.

It was only when central banks decided that deflation was a bad thing that we have had persistent inflation. Inflation has only been a feature of modern economies from about the early 1900’s onwards (incidentally, the US Federal Reserve Bank came into being in 1913).

Why is deflation the enemy? Deflationary periods are useful to dampen and remove mal-investments from the markets and bring the economy back into equilibrium. This is now being prevented from happening.

Japan is well into its third decade of deflation. Asset prices (property, stocks and businesses) are about half the value they were during the 1980’s and have never recovered those highs. The various governments of the day have tried desperately to stimulate inflation and asset price growth through massive quantitative easing (far greater than the US) and zero and negative interest rate policies. It hasn’t worked. Inflation is still negligible and asset prices are still languishing. And yet Japan is still ticking along nicely and they’re in no immediate economic trouble. Why? Because inflation isn’t needed!

And why are our politicians and central banks so desperate to see inflation? Because it increases asset prices, which brings about the so called “wealth effect”. When asset prices are rising, people feel wealthier and more secure and this supposedly encourages people to spend more. And why is this a good thing? Because under a fiat (debt backed, not gold backed) monetary system (pretty much all developed nations and most developing nations) in order for the economy to grow, we need to borrow more and get further and further into debt. In other words consume today with tomorrow’s income.

The record amount of debt we currently have in Australia does not bode well either. Australia is currently one of the most indebted nations in the world. We have record amounts of private and corporate debt, and public debt is increasing faster than any other developed nation.

Rising public debt endangers our AAA credit rating, which in turn will increase borrowing costs for the major banks causing interest rate rises above the RBA “official” rate. Many of the private debt holders won’t be able to afford any interest rate rises. A massive amount of this private debt is secured against this non-productive consumption item, property, which will either be defaulted upon or sold at a loss.

What does this mean for the housing bubble? Who knows! It could continue for another 10 years, start to deflate next month or pop in a year.

The markets can only be gamed for so long before they revert back to the mean. We are probably now entering an extended deflationary period and sluggish global economic growth, after more than 100 years of constant inflation. Get used to it. This is most likely the new normal.

Two big property myths

Myth 1 – Property prices double every 7 to 10 years.

There are a lot of property myths out there about Australian property, but one of the most pervasive is that property supposedly doubles every seven to 10 years. But does it really?

Anybody who bought property in the past 45 or so years has been the beneficiary of the huge loosening of credit brought about by US President Johnson in 1968 and US President Nixon in 1971 decoupling and then severing the link between the US dollar and gold. Prior to this, under the Bretton Woods agreement in 1944 the US dollar was backed by gold. The world’s currencies were also indirectly backed by gold, by virtue of the fact that the world’s currencies were valued against the US dollar on the exchange rate.

That all changed when the gold link was severed. What that did, in essence, was to change the economy from gold backed to a credit backed and driven economy. This meant the economy would only grow if credit was increasing, so people were greatly encouraged to accumulate more debt by governments and central bankers. And many people were happy to oblige.

This was never going to continue indefinitely. And in this low inflation, low interest environment, it is now starting to pull back.

When looking at Australian house prices from about 1880 until late 1960’s/early 1970’s, prices were relatively flat, when adjusted for inflation. Once credit was loosened however, from the late 1960’s onward, house prices went parabolic over and above the inflation rates. The gains seen over the past 45 or so years are a product of this huge credit expansion.

Pretty much anybody who purchased a house in that time benefitted from increasing property values. Unless they were actually located over a mine shaft, too close to the edge of an eroding cliff, bought at the top of a local bubble, eg. Gold Coast real estate during the 1970’s and 1980’s or they simply paid too much in the first place (which eventually corrected due to increasing prices), prices generally went up far in excess of the inflation rate.

The people who benefitted from this windfall weren’t geniuses, they were just in the right place at the right time. But many thought they were because they made money each time they sold and because they didn’t understand the underlying parameters that allowed this to occur.

So the myth of property prices doubling every seven to 10 years was born. The fact that this had only happened over the past 45 or so years, didn’t factor into the thinking. “Just over the past 45 years” somehow became “Always”.

There were even pretty graphs with a starting year point and an ending year point to support this “fact”, but once again, the data was extrapolated and prices averaged out over the time frame, rather than show actual annual prices for the period in question. And more often than not, these were not adjusted for inflation. As previously mentioned, property prices stayed fairly flat from 1880 until the late 1960’s/early 1970’s. They certainly didn’t double, for example, from 1910 to 1920 or 1930 to 1940, but the graphs made it appear as though it did.

Now, however, in the current period of low inflation and low interest rates, I believe property prices are reverting back to the more normal mean of only increasing in line with inflation.

Changing demographics as baby boomers retire and change from spenders into savers, will impact on house prices as well, particularly when they start to sell their assets to fund their retirement. Not just prices for property, but shares and businesses as well.

The glut of flats being built in and around Australia’s capital cities will also have a dampening effect on housing prices, particularly in attached dwellings.

Property price corrections could happen as soon as the 2017-2018 financial year, if not even sooner. This glut is mostly investor style stock in the form of tiny one or two bedroom flats. Some are so small you don’t need to bring your cat with you on inspection to know that you won’t be able to swing it in there. This represents a finite and small market. There are not many that have been designed for owner occupiers or families.

The largest Australian demographic is still families with children, making up nearly half of households, and household sizes are also increasing, not decreasing. Of the other half of singles and couples not all of them necessarily want to live in a flat. According to Matusik the demand for this type of property represents a much smaller percentage than that for detached, semi-detached (with a garden) or small lot housing suitable for families with children and/or pets. And not a great deal is being built for aged care or people who want to age in place with single level, no stairs and no lift dwellings, although this is changing slowly.

I can see a time very soon when even those who have managed to purchase and settle on these flats, will tire of low, no or even negative capital gain, low rental yields and longer vacancies due to the glut. However they still have to fork out every month to pay for the expenses.

It doesn’t help that our greedy and lazy Councils and state governments are only too happy to keep adding more and more blocks of flats. The incentive for them is to keep this gravy train rolling on as long as it can as it represents the biggest return for them.

The key here is the long term. In the short term, prices may rise but they can also fall. Capital gain only really exists if it is a realised capital gain.

Which brings us to our next myth.

Myth 2 – Australia property prices never fall.

The way the global economies are at the moment, there is no guarantee that prices will remain stable, let alone increase any time soon. And with the glut of flats coming into the market in a number of capital cities, most likely just as the global market enters a serious downturn, falling real estate prices are a very real option, particularly from investors exiting the market. As previously mentioned, when they are not seeing any real capital gain (after inflation) and thanks to the glut, have very low yields and longer vacancy periods, but still have to put their hand in their pocket every month for expenses, they’ll start to sell.

Real estate, after all, is a non-productive consumption item.

What goes up can also come down. What people don’t seem to realise is that unless any capital gain is locked in or realised (ie. sold at the highest valuation price), it’s not real capital gain. You cannot rely on the greater fool theory forever. This is the theory that a greater fool will come along and pay you more for your “asset” than you paid for it initially. The banks have been complicit in this, allowing borrowing against any increase in equity so the debt load is constantly increasing. This strategy is also pushed by property spruikers as a means of increasing your property portfolio. It’s amazing how many interviews I’ve heard where a guest is introduced as a property investor with an “X” million dollar property portfolio.

Yep, they might “own” $2m worth of property, but if it’s secured against a debt of $2.5m, that’s hardly a sound financial position to be in. If and when that happens, the friendly bank won’t be so friendly any more.

The problem is that, as previously mentioned, housing is a non-productive consumption item whose purpose is to provide shelter, but is being sold as an investment item. Refer to the aforementioned paragraph on investor quality blocks of tiny one or two bedroom flats being built in just about every Australian capital inner city. These are not attractive for families who generally require more bedrooms and prefer detached, semi-detached with garden or small lot housing.

I feel for those who have been suckered in to buying one of these off the plan “disaster waiting to happen” flats, particularly if they can’t settle when the time comes.

As well as property not doubling every seven to 10 years over a long period of time, so is it entirely possible that Australian property prices can actually fall. And this is even more likely at this particular juncture.

We are entering a deflationary period, a period of asset price falls. The reason the massive money printing or quantitative easing programs we have seen over the past few years by many countries including the US, Japan, Europe and UK, to name but a few, have not succeeded in increasing asset prices consistently, kick starting the economy or causing massive inflation or even hyperinflation is that this money printing has just stopped the deflationary forces from having their full effect.

There is a train of thought, particularly amongst politicians and central bankers that inflation is good but deflation is bad. But I disagree that inflation is bad. Before the turn of the last century, and incidentally before the proliferation of central banks, deflation was as much a part of an economy as inflation. Before the 1900’s periods of inflation was generally always matched with periods of deflation.

It was only when central banks decided that deflation was a bad thing and we should only have inflation, that we have had persistent inflation. Inflation has only been a feature of modern economies from about the 1910’s onwards (incidentally, the US Federal Reserve Bank came into being in 1913).

Why is deflation the enemy? Deflationary periods are useful to dampen mal-investments and bring the economy back into equilibrium.

Japan is entering its third lost “decade” of deflationary period. Asset prices (property, stocks and businesses) are about half the value they were during the 1980’s and have never recovered those highs. The various governments of the day have tried desperately to stimulate inflation and asset price growth through massive quantitative easing (far greater than the US) and zero and negative interest rate policies. It hasn’t worked, the inflation rate is still negligible and asset prices are still languishing. And yet Japan is still ticking along nicely and they’re in no immediate economic trouble. Why? Because inflation isn’t needed!

And why are our politicians and central banks so desperate to see inflation? Because it increases asset prices, which brings about the so called “wealth effect”. When asset prices are rising, people feel wealthier and more secure and this supposedly makes people spend more. And why is this a good thing? Because under a fiat monetary system (pretty much all developed nations and most developing nations) in order for the economy to grow, we need to borrow more and get further and further into debt. In other words consume today with tomorrow’s income.

Oh, and I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. In a properly functioning economy, all assets, including property, only rise in line with inflation. Maybe we’re reverting to the mean on that too.

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The Australian Economy & it’s Effect on Housing

A recent real estate article outlined why real estate in Australia was unlikely to crash. It then went on to list a number of reasons about Australia’s economy to support this argument. There were a couple of factors I agreed with, but a number of things were so wildly inaccurate I felt I had to respond. This is my responses to each point made. It doesn’t mean that Australian property prices will crash soon. But it doesn’t mean they won’t ever crash either, at some stage.

The bold text at the beginning of each point is a point in the article for a non crash. The text after the bold is my response.

A depression or a severe recession unlikely. I and many other contrarian commentators disagree. I think a global depression or severe recession could be as likely as next year (2016). The world’s economies are slowing and the pace since the GFC has been lacklustre to say the least. There are too many variables to list here and include factors such as the Baltic Dry Index, which incidentally is at its lowest levels in decades, but any or all of these can impact on Australia’s and the global economies. Given the amount of money many countries have printed we should have absolutely booming economies, but we don’t. We instead have sluggish growth and many countries failing to get traction and slipping into and out of recession. The very thing that saved us during the GFC, China, is now the thing that will impact the most on us due to their slowing economy. Whatever happens outside Australia will impact on Australia internally. Even the IMF is continually adjusting growth figures down.
Unemployment levels low. Now seriously! Does any thinking person still believe the data massaged, manipulated, “seasonally adjusted”, watered down, made politically more palatable figure the ABS releases as the unemployment rate is in any way accurate? The official figure is not measured the way it used to be, even as recently as the 1970’s. The Roy Morgan Research Study releases parallel unemployment level figures to the ABS. It’s figures paint a less rosy picture with unemployment at nearly 9% and the combined unemployed and underemployed figures as high as 17.4%.
Interest rates rising. This one I agree with. Interest rates are unlikely to rise anytime soon. Actually, to quantify that, “official” interest rates are unlikely to rise soon. We should ask ourselves why interest rates are so low. Lowering interest rates are usually used by central bankers when a country’s economy is slowing or tanking, to try and stimulate it because confidence in the economy is low. Regardless of the fact that the last dozen interest rate cuts have not stimulated the economy and with each subsequent cut, the law of diminishing returns come into play (the effect is shorter and less effective), the RBA will likely cut interest rates again as our economy once again falters. There is a race to the bottom with low, zero or even negative interest rates thanks to currency wars and no country can actually afford to raise their official interest rates. The world’s economies are carrying so much debt, it is unlikely they can sustain an official interest rate rise, despite the US Federal Reserve Bank raising interest rates one whole quarter of one percent this month (December 2015). Also, it’s not the job of the RBA to “save” those who borrowed too much and then find themselves over their heads when real interest rates rise (see point 5 below).
A huge oversupply of properties. This is most certainly the case in most major capital cities, as rent seekers try to find yield due to low interest rates, and look for it through other means, such as multiple dwelling development to maximise returns. This of course leads to a glut of attached stock, such as we are seeing in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and possibly even Perth, which also has a glut of commercial property. Several commentators are on record as saying we are building too much of the wrong stock. The type of housing of which we need more is detached housing, small lot housing, aged care housing and housing that allow people to age in their own single level, no stair homes. These are not being built, as our Councils and state governments have become lazy and dependent on the easy money to be made from constructing block after block of flats.
Credit market illiquidity or a credit squeeze. Australians currently hold record debt (which I will expand upon further in point 11). This has been possible due to foreigners being willing to lend more to Australian banks, partly due to our higher interest rates. When our interest rates drop too low, or global events make foreign investors nervous and are then no longer willing to lend money to Australia, real interest rates could rise above and beyond the level the RBA has set official interest rates. This has already happened in part due to the tightening lending criteria set by APRA. If public debt (government spending) becomes too high, it will make us unattractive to lend money to for the rest of the world. That coupled with high personal debt could threaten our AAA credit rating and real interest rates will rise regardless of what the official interest rate is. The ability of our banks to access foreign funds for lending is entirely outside of their control and as availability tightens, real interest rates rise.
Robust population growth. Australia’s birth rate fell to 1.8 children per couple according to the most recent figures. It is heading to its lowest level in 20 years at 1.7 children per couple. We are not even replacing ourselves. Immigration is also slowing, and the type of immigrants are usually families. Families have lower housing requirements than singles, ie. one house can house a number of people just as easily as it can house a single person. This put downward pressure on housing requirements with less housing and rentals required.
A healthy economy. Really? Based on what? Thanks to a slowing China, our mining boom is over, with record low commodity prices. We have a negligible manufacturing industry. Our service industries are struggling. Our governments and politicians would like to replace the mining boom with a construction boom, but all we build are more and more blocks of flats. How does property provide the long term productivity and ongoing employment that a real business provides? Once it’s built, it doesn’t employ many people consistently. We are not going to become wealthy selling properties to each other. This relies on the greater fool theory and eventually there is no greater fool. As the real unemployment and underemployed figures show, our economy is not really doing that great.
A sound banking system. Once again, seriously! Our banks are overexposed to property, with some banks holding as much as 70% of its loans against property. Their investment in business, particularly small business, the real powerhouse employer, is negligible. They have belatedly begun to realise that if there are no businesses, there are no people to actually buy all these properties that are being built. How many people know that at least Westpac, Commonwealth, National Australia Bank, Bankwest and AMP among others, required bailout funds during the GFC under the US government’s TARP program? How many people realise that there was such a run on Australian banks during the GFC, that the Royal Australian Mint had to do emergency print runs to print more money because the banks were 24 hours away from running out of depositor’s money? Australian banks sound? Those in the know definitely know better, but it suits the banks, central banks and politicians to keep up that illusion.
Business confidence. This can change in an instant. All it will take is a black swan event, or something that is outside our control, such as acts of terrorism, acts of war (we have a threat right on our doorstep with China and its claim of sovereignty over parts of the China Sea) or something else that is unexpected and the confidence mood will swing the other way. Australia is a commodity producing country, just like Canada and Brazil. These two countries are currently in recession, and Japan just went into recession again.
Consumer confidence. Ditto as for business confidence.
A healthy level of household debt. And again, seriously, are you kidding! We currently hold record levels of household debt. We have half as much again as we had during the GFC, which was a debt crisis. A recent Barclays survey listed Australian households as amongst the most indebted in the world. The ABS reported Australian personal debt reached record levels at $1.8 trillion for the country, or nearly $80,000 for every person. Household debt as a percentage of disposable income is at all-time highs at over 175%. That is definitely NOT a healthy level of household debt. The number of mortgaged homes is increasing and the number of homes owned outright is decreasing. Based on these facts and figures, if some households have no debt, it means that others are extremely overleveraged and overexposed and extremely vulnerable to a downturn.
Property prices growth slowing. Property prices growth is slowing, and I believe we are reverting back to the mean of property prices increasing in line with inflation, which is what it does in a properly functioning economy. As we are now in what is most likely a low inflation and low interest rate environment, and which is unlikely to change in the near future, we are making our way back to the new normal. The parabolic capital gain asset price rises are only a product of the past 46 years since the decoupling of currencies from gold and the easy availability of credit. Before that, property prices, adjusted for inflation, were fairly flat.

The point is, nobody knows what is going to happen in the future. We are in uncharted territory, we do not have any precedent for what might happen next apart from the fact that no fiat currency has ever lasted beyond a couple of generations and creating money ex nihilo and ad infinitum has always ended badly throughout history. Maybe property prices will crash and maybe they won’t. We could continue on as we have been for another 20 years, or it could all collapse in a heap next week. We do have a very large investment stake in what is essentially a non-productive consumption item and we are not immune from corrections. However, as economist, John Maynard Keynes observed, the market has the ability to remain irrational longer than we can stay solvent.

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