APRIL 16 — Homebuyers in KL and Penang have something in common with those in Melbourne and Sydney — increasingly unaffordable homes.
Their Australian counterparts, however, have gone one step further from merely complaining about it and are actually participating in a campaign — led by lobby group Prosper Australia — to bring down house prices via a home buying strike.
Property prices are a function of what the market will bear. The price for a house can yo-yo up and down for no reason other than what you are willing to pay for it.
The reaction to the Australian homebuyer strike launched last month was predictably divided — and sparked an online war of words between buyers and sellers.
On one side of the divide were the property investors. And nothing gives property investors a cold sweat faster than the thought of demand drying up and dragging down the value of their properties.
Not surprising then they have condemned the strike and said that homebuyers should simply try and save more money instead of complaining about property prices.
On the other side of the divide were the homebuyers — those looking to buy not for investment but simply as a place to live — who claim that the property market has become a ponzi scheme where investors buy property hoping to sell it at a higher price to the next buyer who buys it in hopes of selling it at an even higher price to the next buyer and so on and so forth.
The homebuyers feel that once the bottom part of the pyramid is taken out of the equation, the scheme will be starved of new players, causing a correction in the market.
They moreover sensed that the property market may have topped out — Melbourne property prices, for example, were reported to have dipped 1.8 per cent in the three months leading to February — and the newer buyers, purportedly, will be the ones left holding the damage after earlier investors exit with a profit.
One reader of the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper who was opposed to the strike said that prices are determined by supply and demand and those going on strike were unrealistic in their expectations, saying: “So this bunch of latest GetUp crowd is going to hold its breath like a petulant child until the market delivers them property at prices they like?”
A supporter of the strike, however, argued back that the campaign was merely an exercise of the free market.
“Quite right! How dare buyers only buy at prices they want to buy at. What do they think this is, a free market?” the reader retorted.
In an online poll in the Sydney Morning Herald, 56 per cent of 3,681 readers who responded said that they support the idea of a homebuyer strike while 44 per cent were opposed to it.
In a separate poll, however, 67 per cent of 21,120 readers said that the homebuyer strike will be “unlikely” to bring down house prices while 21 per cent said that it has a “reasonable” chance of making a difference and 12 per cent said it is “too hard” to say for certain.
And while only 2,596 supported the online petition and a mere 707 people liked the Facebook page, some suggested that the numbers could still be enough to tip the balance in property prices as Melbourne, for example, had only 815 house auctions in a recent weekend.
Whether it actually affects property prices directly or not, the strike has managed to provoke hundreds of comments in newspapers and served to further fuel the housing affordability debate in the major cities of Australia.
After some local media reports emerged last year about runaway property prices, the Najib administration made a few attempts at cooling the market such as capping the loan-to-value ratio for third properties.
But compared with our neighbours such as Singapore, which raised stamp duty on new properties to as much as 16 per cent of the sale price to be paid by the seller, and China, which raised interest rates multiple times since October and even in some cases, froze mortgage activity for third properties, the local measures can be considered very mild.
Malaysians aren’t known for their consumer activism but if affordability in cities like KL and Penang doesn’t improve, then a homebuyer strike may start to look more and more appealing.
Members of GetUp! did not support its plans to strike against the home loan market in Australia.
Members of activist group GetUp! have refused to support its calls for a strike on buying houses that was proposed due to the lack of available home loan deals in Australia.
GetUp! originally suggested the action to protest against the current state of the mortgage market as affordability has declined in recent years.
However, its supporters have voiced their concerns about such a strike and have decided not to go ahead with it, reports the Sydney Morning Herald.
Online community co-ordinator for GetUp! Kelsey Cooke said: "While the issue of housing affordability is clearly an issue that resonates with plenty of people, GetUp! members don't support a boycott campaign."
She revealed that only ten per cent of its supporters wanted to go ahead with the campaign to raise their grievance at the lack of home loans in the nation.
Smartline's personal mortgage adviser Miriam Castilla recently told people considering applying for a mortgage that it is a difficult process, telling the newspaper that many banks with the best accounts are restricting their lending criteria to customers.
Members of GetUp! did not support its plans to strike against the home loan market in Australia.
Members of activist group GetUp! have refused to support its calls for a strike on buying houses that was proposed due to the lack of available home loan deals in Australia.
GetUp! originally suggested the action to protest against the current state of the mortgage market as affordability has declined in recent years.
However, its supporters have voiced their concerns about such a strike and have decided not to go ahead with it, reports the Sydney Morning Herald.
Online community co-ordinator for GetUp! Kelsey Cooke said: "While the issue of housing affordability is clearly an issue that resonates with plenty of people, GetUp! members don't support a boycott campaign."
She revealed that only ten per cent of its supporters wanted to go ahead with the campaign to raise their grievance at the lack of home loans in the nation.
Smartline's personal mortgage adviser Miriam Castilla recently told people considering applying for a mortgage that it is a difficult process, telling the newspaper that many banks with the best accounts are restricting their lending criteria to customers.
By Nate Sawyer ADNFCR-2135-ID-800522901-ADNFCR
It was a silly idea anyway.
You could start up a tent city in Canberra as a protest - but you'd probably only get them to increase the first homeowners grant.
Seems when politicians try to help - they invariably make things worse.
Whenever you have an argument with someone, there comes a moment where you must ask yourself, whatever your political persuasion, 'am I the Nazi?'
The home buyers strike is going to fail, but more than that, it deserves to fail.
There are plenty of reasons to skewer the movement simply because it won’t work, but the strike is a mistake for far more than just its ineffectiveness.
The campaign will ultimately prove self-defeating because it’s more about venting helpless rage and the delights of schadenfreude than putting out real solutions to the nation’s housing affordability crisis.
Last night, tax reform group Prosper Australia, the campaign’s sponsor and driving force, held a “pop the housing bubble party” in a Melbourne bar.
Called to “celebrate falling house prices”, according to the event flyer, about 20 people showed up to discuss the current housing situation, formulate new strategies for the strike, and relax after doing a bit of laughter yoga.
“The purpose of the buyers strike is not an act of militancy or of unionism, it is about informing naïve first home buyers, people who don’t have a good source of information apart from the spruikers, apart from the spivs, apart from people saying ‘oh yes, you must buy’, and their parents are telling them the same thing, ‘don’t worry about the price, prices always go up’.
I’ve got bad news for everybody here…prices don’t always go up, prices correct,” Prosper campaign manager David Collyer said.
Sounds admirable, right? But the schadenfreude was still yet come, served with a side champagne and caviar.
“We want to celebrate the bursting of the bubble, not maliciously because some people are going to get hurt, but as a way of celebrating that in a few years time we will have opportunity again, that when things revert to the normal we will be able to do the things we have always wanted to do.”
“Ladies and gentleman, I give you economic freedom because that’s what low house prices, low land prices offer to us. Economic freedom,” Mr Collyer said, leading the assembled crowd in a toast.
Champagne and caviar. It’s not just for Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe.
It’s also the nourishment of choice when you’re celebrating what you hope to be the collapse of one of the most important asset classes in the country, the place where some 70 per cent of the population have parked their money.
Nothing was said about what would happen over those “few years time” – about what life would be like in the post-bubble world. Just a cheer from some at an estimate that prices would probably fall by half.
It’s one thing to believe we’re in a bubble, that it has or is about to pop, and trying your best to get the message out there.
But there’s something perverse in welcoming the news with such obvious glee, any protests that it’s not meant maliciously to the contrary.
(And if you think this is unfairly picking on a few Prosper supporters, try checking out the comments that routinely get posted on Domain.com.au)
A property bubble doesn’t collapse like the controlled demolition of a building. There’s always plenty of collateral damage, so to speak, which makes you wonder how these people think that housing will come so easily within reach when the economy is consequently in the toilet.
Sure, some speculators and estate agents will also get burned, who seem to be the two groups targeted with the most vitriol and hate by the strike’s supporters.
But the only people who really reap the benefits of bubble collapses are those who sell at the top and those still rich enough, and there are always plenty of them, to pillage the wreckage at the bottom.
The great tragedy of the home buyers strike campaign is that Prosper makes some fairly persuasive arguments about the way that property is valued, held and taxed, but its message is getting drowned out in the noise.
By and large, the media has already moved on because the campaign has already spent its capital as an object of news or curiosity. Activist organisers GetUp! aren’t interested; even pledge numbers aren’t growing much anymore.
People who can’t afford to buy can’t strike effectively against something they weren’t going to be able to do anyways. Even if all of the 1300 people who’ve so far pledged to stay out of the market were actually genuine buyers, it still only amounts to about two weeks worth of lost sales in Melbourne alone.
And how many people are actually wading through the hyperbole to hear the details of what Prosper is actually all about?
The campaign has had a good run in terms of publicity.
But in continuing on in this way – if the bubble does in fact burst and wholesale economic misery ensues – Prosper and the campaign’s supporters are destined to be remembered only as those who revelled in the tragedy’s arrival.
Come the day, I’ll certainly be one of those calling to ask: Are you still celebrating?
Author: Karl Fitzgerald Print This Post Print This Post
Why the Home Buyer’s Strike is of Value
Chris Vedelago wrote a critique of our recent activities:
The campaign will ultimately prove self-defeating because it’s more about venting helpless rage and the delights of schadenfreude than putting out real solutions to the nation’s housing affordability crisis.
I have friends who have been forced to move 3 times in the last year, threatening to take a machete to the agents office if it happens again. Each time the owner has been selling their property, bailing out of the market to a greater fool lured into buying at some of the world’s most expensive prices.
Unless someone is willing to speak up for these people (and be listened to), words can become dangerous actions. A public venting of frustration and the feeling that someone is representing their second class rights helps to alleviate just some of this.
None of the political parties are providing such leadership.
Governments at all levels are implicit in the demands that young people buy into the market just as it is crashing, forcing them to subscribe to a lifetime paying 50% plus of their income on somewhere to live. In many cases, couples are being forced by high land prices to both work full-time.
According to SQM Research’s latest e-news, there were 68% more propreties on the market in April (y.o.y). Don’t Buy Now!
We would be happy to debate anyone on the notion that we haven’t promoted ‘real solutions’ to the nation’s housing affordability issues. Please read our lobbying letter to MP’s. Listed there are 5 rock solid policy responses to the speculative spigot that our tax ystem unleashes. Visitors to our website can always look at our Policy Position documents, including Dr Terry Dwyer’s in depth application to the Henry Tax Review.
Many of these solutions were mentioned at the Pop the Housing Bubble Party.
Vedelago writes:
It’s also the nourishment of choice when you’re celebrating what you hope to be the collapse of one of the most important asset classes in the country, the place where some 70 per cent of the population have parked their money.
For decades we have been critical of the over-emphasis of real estate as a specualtive playground. We urgently need to restore housing’s primary role as a human right to put a roof over our head. The REIV’s Robert Larocca states: (1.13 min mark)
If it (the Buyer’s Strike) were to be even moderately successful, the people who get hurt are the thousands of people selling their homes. Why do they have to pay the price for our community’s inability to meet our housing needs?
How has society got to a point where it is of a higher moral grounding to defend the right of the have’s over the have not’s? Pain might be caused by a housing crash but we would be much happier if that pain was harder and faster rather than the long correction the US has endured of 5 years. The US is only half way back to long term average housing prices.
Fairfax again:
A property bubble doesn’t collapse like the controlled demolition of a building. There’s always plenty of collateral damage, so to speak, which makes you wonder how these people think that housing will come so easily within reach when the economy is consequently in the toilet.
Chris is right here. The pain will be immense. But some sort of rude shock is needed to awaken the sleeping masses. They are being played as pawns and need a wake up call. Such a crash will force politicians to remove the unfair advantages the have’s are lavished with via the tax system.
To deny a correction back to long term prices is to stifle the productive economy with high rents for one or two more election cycles.
Many people are aware of these dangers as the comments section in this Age article displays. ‘Dave’ sums it up:
The main thing Chris doesn’t understand is where the so called “wealth” of rising house prices comes from. The increase in the price of property is mostly due to rising land value and the people on the receiving end have in most cases added ABSOLUTELY NO VALUE. It is a transfer of wealth and it is young first home buyers who pay for it. So to me its completely inconsistent to say that wishing for a house price collapse is cruel and unwarranted but on the other hand celebrating their rise is ok. Unless somebody is adding value it is a zero sum game and squaring up the ledger a little will be healthy. I agree wholeheartedly with Kira – the sooner this pops the better – we can stop robbing each other and get back to working for a living.
Dave – May 11, 2011, 11:00PM
A recent Guardian article Tax property, not people, for a fairer society reinforced this:
As the economist Martin Weale has argued, the accumulation of property wealth is in effect an act of theft perpetrated on the younger generation who must pay the exhorbitant prices demanded by baby boomers or rent.
Using real estate as a profiteering vehicle only enables a ‘services’ sector (AKA banking sector) more money with which to leverage through other speculative vehicles such as the derivatives market and our casino currency.
The commercial and industrial sectors would have a greater capacity to pay higher wages when rents are pushed down by keeping a permanent lid on land bubbles. Productive capitalists would have a greater chance to compete with mining wages if a Land Value Tax was implemented, the MRRT was set at 40%, negative gearing removed and the FHOG banished at all government levels.
Adam Campbell on our Facebook page comments:
With regular publicity like this the buyers strike has already had a win, maybe not so much as in an actual strike numbers but the level of awareness around prices and the FACT that they dont always go up is invaluable. Even if it saves one person any amount of money from 30 yrs of bank slavery then the job is done.
MELBOURNE:- 40,000 young families turned away from a lifetime of heavy debt and bitter disappointment in the last year refusing to accept Australia’s grossly inflated house prices, according to a survey overnight by website RateCity.
“Here is the evidence FHB’s are on strike, as we announced in March,” Prosper Australia Campaign Manager David Collyer said today.
Housing is heavily dependent on FHB’s bidding up prices. Their large borrowings bring new money into the market, increasing the equity of existing owners and freeing them to trade up. This percolates throughout the market. Further, FHB’s are the most innocent buyers, easily led into mis-judging and over-paying for homes.
“The Home Buyers Strike was not an attempt to brew up a social movement and install Prosper at its head – far from it. We wanted to illustrate the massive economic forces at play when Prosper called the market top and the new downward trend.
According to researcher Philip Soos, only 18 people predicted the bursting of The Great Australian Land Bubble, four of whom are Prosper affiliates.
“40,000 households privately decided to delay buying and defer starting families. Their absence is sorely felt by the housing industry left holding tens of thousands of unsold new homes on the outskirts of our cities.
“These young adults have turned their attentions and energy elsewhere: to higher study, travel, the sharemarket or merely to saving a giant deposit. It will take substantial price falls to coax them back.
“My heart aches for the 90,000 FHB’s who did buy,” Collyer said.
“Their limited equity leaves them totally exposed to falling house prices. And the loss of an income or lower earnings could easily turn them into sub-prime borrowers with mortgage repayments above 30 per cent of household earnings.
“We are now in an era of falling house prices, widespread debt reduction and domestic economic underperformance as the high Aussie dollar makes trading conditions very difficult for non-mining exporters and import-competing businesses.”
Prosper affirms its prediction land prices will fall by 50 per cent over six years in real (inflation adjusted) terms.
“Halving merely returns land prices to the long-term trend line. If anything, prices may well over-shoot that on the downside. This is the end of the Ponzi scheme, as Hyman Minsky would describe it,” Collyer said.
Author: Karl Fitzgerald Print This Post Print This Post
Why the Home Buyer’s Strike is of Value
Chris Vedelago wrote a critique of our recent activities:
The campaign will ultimately prove self-defeating because it’s more about venting helpless rage and the delights of schadenfreude than putting out real solutions to the nation’s housing affordability crisis.
I have friends who have been forced to move 3 times in the last year, threatening to take a machete to the agents office if it happens again. Each time the owner has been selling their property, bailing out of the market to a greater fool lured into buying at some of the world’s most expensive prices.
Unless someone is willing to speak up for these people (and be listened to), words can become dangerous actions. A public venting of frustration and the feeling that someone is representing their second class rights helps to alleviate just some of this.
None of the political parties are providing such leadership.
Governments at all levels are implicit in the demands that young people buy into the market just as it is crashing, forcing them to subscribe to a lifetime paying 50% plus of their income on somewhere to live. In many cases, couples are being forced by high land prices to both work full-time.
According to SQM Research’s latest e-news, there were 68% more propreties on the market in April (y.o.y). Don’t Buy Now!
We would be happy to debate anyone on the notion that we haven’t promoted ‘real solutions’ to the nation’s housing affordability issues. Please read our lobbying letter to MP’s. Listed there are 5 rock solid policy responses to the speculative spigot that our tax ystem unleashes. Visitors to our website can always look at our Policy Position documents, including Dr Terry Dwyer’s in depth application to the Henry Tax Review.
Many of these solutions were mentioned at the Pop the Housing Bubble Party.
Vedelago writes:
It’s also the nourishment of choice when you’re celebrating what you hope to be the collapse of one of the most important asset classes in the country, the place where some 70 per cent of the population have parked their money.
For decades we have been critical of the over-emphasis of real estate as a specualtive playground. We urgently need to restore housing’s primary role as a human right to put a roof over our head. The REIV’s Robert Larocca states: (1.13 min mark)
If it (the Buyer’s Strike) were to be even moderately successful, the people who get hurt are the thousands of people selling their homes. Why do they have to pay the price for our community’s inability to meet our housing needs?
How has society got to a point where it is of a higher moral grounding to defend the right of the have’s over the have not’s? Pain might be caused by a housing crash but we would be much happier if that pain was harder and faster rather than the long correction the US has endured of 5 years. The US is only half way back to long term average housing prices.
Fairfax again:
A property bubble doesn’t collapse like the controlled demolition of a building. There’s always plenty of collateral damage, so to speak, which makes you wonder how these people think that housing will come so easily within reach when the economy is consequently in the toilet.
Chris is right here. The pain will be immense. But some sort of rude shock is needed to awaken the sleeping masses. They are being played as pawns and need a wake up call. Such a crash will force politicians to remove the unfair advantages the have’s are lavished with via the tax system.
To deny a correction back to long term prices is to stifle the productive economy with high rents for one or two more election cycles.
Many people are aware of these dangers as the comments section in this Age article displays. ‘Dave’ sums it up:
The main thing Chris doesn’t understand is where the so called “wealth” of rising house prices comes from. The increase in the price of property is mostly due to rising land value and the people on the receiving end have in most cases added ABSOLUTELY NO VALUE. It is a transfer of wealth and it is young first home buyers who pay for it. So to me its completely inconsistent to say that wishing for a house price collapse is cruel and unwarranted but on the other hand celebrating their rise is ok. Unless somebody is adding value it is a zero sum game and squaring up the ledger a little will be healthy. I agree wholeheartedly with Kira – the sooner this pops the better – we can stop robbing each other and get back to working for a living.
Dave – May 11, 2011, 11:00PM
A recent Guardian article Tax property, not people, for a fairer society reinforced this:
As the economist Martin Weale has argued, the accumulation of property wealth is in effect an act of theft perpetrated on the younger generation who must pay the exhorbitant prices demanded by baby boomers or rent.
Using real estate as a profiteering vehicle only enables a ‘services’ sector (AKA banking sector) more money with which to leverage through other speculative vehicles such as the derivatives market and our casino currency.
The commercial and industrial sectors would have a greater capacity to pay higher wages when rents are pushed down by keeping a permanent lid on land bubbles. Productive capitalists would have a greater chance to compete with mining wages if a Land Value Tax was implemented, the MRRT was set at 40%, negative gearing removed and the FHOG banished at all government levels.
Adam Campbell on our Facebook page comments:
With regular publicity like this the buyers strike has already had a win, maybe not so much as in an actual strike numbers but the level of awareness around prices and the FACT that they dont always go up is invaluable. Even if it saves one person any amount of money from 30 yrs of bank slavery then the job is done.s
Some fine comments and on the money.
I especially like the last paragragh. If only enough FHB could get fed the correct information.
I hate banks. They would suck you dry through morgages if they could. All your disposable income to the bank. Non left to enjoy with the family and with non left to spend there goes the economy as well. You rely on the spending of the masses for businesses to flourish.
Now with everyone Maxed out to the banks. Theres not much fun money and the economy's going down the toilet. mining excepted
GetUp! demands apology for senator's Nazi youth slur
Jessica Wright
November 3, 2011 - 5:07PM
The activist group GetUp! and the Australian Greens are demanding Liberal senator Ian Macdonald withdraw comments linking them to the youth league of Nazi Germany.
Queensland Liberal Senator Ian MacDonald made the remark during a fiery Senate debate on the carbon tax legislation in response to GetUp! plans for nationwide celebrations on Tuesday to mark the expected passage of the bill.
Referring to the organisation as “the Hitler Youth wing of the Greens political movement,’’ Senator MacDonald repeated his statement after the Greens Deputy Leader, Christine Milne, objected on a point of order and demanded the comment be withdrawn.
Senate deputy president Stephen Parry refused to rule the comment out of order and the Greens have pledged to refer both Liberal senators to the upper house privileges committee, saying the ‘‘Coalition’s dirty politics have hit a new low’’.
GetUp! national director Simon Sheikh has written a letter to the chairman of the privileges committee, Western Australian Senator David Johnston, saying the comparison was made with ‘‘a weight of hatred and ignorance’’.
GetUp! is demanding their response be included in Hansard.
Jewish Liberal backbencher Josh Frydenburg slapped down his colleagues saying ‘‘while robust political debate is part of a vibrant democracy, however, the use of Nazi analogies to make political points is inappropriate and offensive’’.
Michael Danby, a Labor backbencher and high-profile member of the Jewish community, criticised GetUp!'s ‘‘parrot-script, mass emails to members of parliament’’ as counter productive.
But but he said it was ‘‘both inappropriate and laughable for Senator McDonald to use these Nazi comparisons with just another group of Australians with whom he and the Conservative Opposition disagree”.
Senator Milne said the slur was ‘‘an extraordinary abuse of the memories of the countless millions slaughtered by the Nazis and an abhorrent offence to Holocaust survivors and their families’’.
The Greens have also called on Opposition leader Tony Abbott to order Senator McDonald his senator withdraw the remark.
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