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A survey of the country’s largest home builders shows a strong bounce in Australia’s property sales in November 2016.
The HIA New Homes Sales Report has revealed that following a dip to a two-year low last October, new home sales recovered significantly in November, an indication that the national new home construction sector remains healthy.
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HIA chief economist Harley Dale said the sector may have just passed its peak, but the short-term outlook is healthy.
The November update for the HIA’s monthly New Home Sales survey shows a 6.1 per cent bounce in seasonally-adjusted new home sales. Over the three months to November 2016, the total number of new home sales fell by 0.7 per cent, down by only 0.2 per cent when compared to the same three-month period in 2015.
“At this stage of the new home building cycle, that’s a very impressive result. This is already the largest and longest national new home construction cycle in history,” Mr Dale said.
“A healthy outlook for new home construction in the first half of 2017 is good news for the Australian economy because of the huge impact that new home construction has on broader economic activity.”
Mr Dale said without the boost from housing in the last five years, the domestic economy would have “slipped into recession”.
“You wouldn’t want to be seeing signals of an imminent and sharp slowdown in national new home building activity, and we’re not. Looking further out, the declines in construction activity will inevitably become chunkier.”
In November 2016, new detached house sales increased by 5.2 per cent, while sales of multi-units were up by 9.3 per cent.
Seasonally-adjusted new detached house sales increased in four out of five mainland states in November 2016.
New South Wales was the exception, with a decline of 5.9 per cent.
In November last year, detached house sales increased by 17.9 per cent in Queensland, 4.7 per cent in Victoria, 4.2 per cent in Western Australia and 4.0 per cent in South Australia.
