China News Service, August 31. According to Reuters, a survey of experts shows that most of the world’s major real estate markets may have peaked since the outbreak, but in the next few years, people’s affordability is expected to continue to be tight. deterioration.
Reuters interviewed more than 100 real estate market experts from various countries on August 10-25, and most of the survey results showed that housing price growth in the next two years will cool down.
However, as most central banks are expected to maintain interest rates close to record lows until next year, it is expected that house price increases will easily exceed wage increases.
Coupled with the rising cost of materials, and even before the epidemic forced many homeowners to seek to expand their living space, there was a lack of affordable housing supply in many markets, so housing prices would almost certainly rise further.
This means that for most people, especially young people who want to buy their first home, the situation will only become more difficult.
“The soaring house price erased the purchasing power brought about by lower interest rates, causing many potential home buyers to postpone their purchases,” said Mark Vitner, a senior analyst at Wells Fargo Bank.
When asked how housing affordability in the markets they track will change in the next few years, more than 80% of respondents, 77 out of 94, said it will deteriorate or remain the same.
Slightly less than half of the people (49%) think it will get worse, and for almost all the hottest markets this year, far more than 50% said so.
"There are obviously many factors affecting today's housing market, including long-term interest rate fluctuations, low housing supply capacity, lack of labor and land, and the scarcity of existing housing stocks," said Scott Anderson, chief analyst at Bank of the West. )Say.
"We predict that housing market activity will stabilize at a more sustainable pace in the next 18 months, and those housing sales that may have been carried out in advance during the epidemic will bring some returns."
If this is the case, then this trend will not ease in the next few years until more houses are built.
However, although housing construction rates are currently lower in most markets, the costs of building materials, labor, and timber are more likely to rise rather than fall.
It is predicted that housing prices in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will rise at a double-digit percentage rate this year, and then slow to single-digit rates in 2022.
In most economies, more than 50% of the analysts surveyed predict that affordability will deteriorate in the next few years. In Australia, nearly 90% of analysts believe so.
In India, only a few analysts predict that house prices will fall; most interviewees said that although two 25 basis point interest rate hikes are expected in the next fiscal year, the country’s affordability will still improve.