I popped up to the Sunshine Coast for the break over Easter, staying in Mooloolaba.
I fell in love with the place I have to say. The locals are a laid back and friendly bunch.
I loved strolling across to the beach of a morning for a quick swim before grabbing a great coffee at the ‘good bean’, then whipping up some bacon and eggs on the BBQ’s by the ocean. The surf club has some great seafood as well.
As always when you find a place you’d love to move to you start flicking through the local papers having a squiz at properties. There was article after article calling the bottom in the real estate market. Apparently things are on the mend on the Sunshine Coast after five difficult years…
A quick search on Domain.com brought up 877 properties for sale in the surrounding area. Nearly 1,000 properties for sale in a fairly small area seems like quite a lot to my mind but perhaps that’s normal for the area.
The prices are certainly not what I would call cheap, with two bedroom apartments listed for about $400,000–$1,000,000 depending on their position. The seven-figure ones were prime positions overlooking the beach, but even so the housing prices remind me of Sydney rather than an hour and a half out of Brisbane.
Bad Data Brings Out the Bears
The shocking data on housing sales released yesterday has definitely placed a large question mark over the view that property has bottomed. If very low interest rates aren’t inspiring people to start buying property it won’t take much bad news to see prices sliding again.
Australian new home sales slid 5.3 per cent in February, driven by sharp falls in Victoria and South Australia. Sales in the detached new homes market are now tracking at the lowest level in the sixteen year history of the series and it was apparently the worst February on record. Hmm. Not good.
Victoria is looking the sickest of the lot with a drop of 13.7 per cent in detached new home sales!
Wow.
It looks like all of that endless optimism isn’t transferring into sales.
Our stock market actually reacted to the bad news on housing, which is a real turn up for the books. Usually bad news is shaken off like rain off a duck’s back, but for once there was some selling, despite the new record highs in the US market.
The only thing holding us up at the moment is the continued buying in the Financials, Health Care, IT and Consumer Staples sectors (i.e. defensives). Resources and small-caps are coming under some intense selling pressure.
Financials Diverging from the Miners
You can see quite clearly from the above chart that there is a huge divergence opening up between the Financials and the Metals and Mining Index. The ASX 200 (blue line) is being dragged higher by the strength in the Financials but the big picture is much muddier beneath the surface.
You can see that the small-cap stocks are also finding it difficult to keep their head above water. There are plenty of small-caps that are going to the wall with the increased difficulty in raising capital to complete their projects.
So while the mainstream media is fixated on the record prices in the US markets it is quite clear that the reality is not so sanguine.
Murray Dawes
Editor, Slipstream Trader
From the Port Phillip Publishing Library
Special Report: Australia’s Energy Stock BLOWOUT
Daily Reckoning: The Australian Government’s Deficit Numbskullery
Money Morning: Good News in China’s Economy? Put This Date in Your Diary…
Pursuit of Happiness: Why a PlayStation and Mining Technology Have More In Common Than You Think
