The HIA New Home Sales Report, a survey of Australia’s largest volume builders, showed a modest rise for the month of October.
HIA Chief Economist, Dr Harley Dale, said: “Following flat results in September, total seasonally adjusted new home sales increased by 3.0 percent during October 2014. The result was a narrowly driven one which reflected growth in detached house sales in Victoria and Western Australia.
“After a relatively sharp decline of 5.7 percent in July, driven by both detached houses and multi-units, total new home sales have mounted a modest recovery,” noted Dale.
“Sales are still off their cyclical peak reached back in April this year, but the overall volume of new home sales is still at an elevated level. That augurs well for healthy new home construction activity persisting into 2015.”
“Australia is on track to commence a record number of homes this year. While undesirable lags in the availability of ABS data prevent confirmation of this outcome until well into next year, the fact is that 2014 is drawing to a close. We now want to be seeing evidence pointing to a healthy prognosis for new home building activity in 2015.
”In this regard we have positive signals coming from three key leading indicators. HIA new home sales and ABS building approvals are past their peaks but remain at elevated levels. Lending for new housing is still trending higher and doesn’t appear to have peaked yet,” concluded Dale.
In the month of October 2014 detached house sales increased by 4.7 percent in Victoria and by 24.8 percent in Western Australia. Detached house sales fell by 3.0 percent in New South Wales and were down by 7.8 percent in Queensland and 1.7 percent in South Australia.
Over the three months to October 2014 detached house sales increased in NSW (+3.7 percent), Queensland (+1.2 percent) and Western Australia (+1.7 percent), but fell in Victoria (-13.4 percent) and South Australia (-6.3 percent).
Andrew Batt, International Group Editor of PropertyGuru Group, wrote this story. To contact him about this or other stories email andrew@propertyguru.com.sg
