From
Belgium. “The boom in the Belgian housing market has past its peak, a new report indicated. ‘Due to the very favourable mortgage conditions, buyers bought larger houses or in more expensive locations,’ ERA Belgium director Iain Cook said. But that does not mean that a row house with three bedrooms has also increased so much in price.”
“Unfortunately, sellers have not realised this, Cook said. It means that more and more houses are being put up for sale at an exaggerated price and are therefore difficult to sell.”
From
Australia. “Welcome to the dark side of the housing boom. The question is, why have we borrowed so much more today? See the point? We took the benefit of lower interest rates and used it to achieve little more than a doubling in the price of homes.”
From
New Zealand. “A slowdown in sales of higher priced houses has put a stop to rising prices in the city’s residential property market. The median selling price slipped $9000 in August at Mount Maunganui and Papamoa, and across the harbour the fall was even bigger, more than $12,000. ‘If you scratch under the surface at the moment there’s nothing much happening,’ said John O’Donnell, principal of LJ Hooker Mount Maunganui.”
“‘Life is not as exciting as some people would like. There are no great trends in the marketplace and prices are definitely not going up,’ he said.”
The
National Post in Canada. “Royal Bank of Canada singled out the Vancouver market as ‘unsustainable,’ based on the fact the current median household income in the city of $54,912 means a typical family would have to shell out 72.8% of their pre-tax income to meet all the expenses of owning an average two-storey home.”
The
New York Sun. “Money manager James Melcher adds that most people believe higher short-term interest rates, increased minimum monthly repayment levels for credit card debt, higher energy prices, the inability of households overburdened with debts to refinance homes in a declining market, the fact that wage earners have had no increase in inflation-adjusted earnings over the past several years, and a variety of other seriously negative factors will only slow consumer spending a fraction of a percent.’”
“‘We suspect that most of them also believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy,’ he quips.”