property

Often you will speak to a fund manager that will talk about its specialist approach, the market niche that it understands well and can leverage, and how the expertise of its team is a differentiator. It’s rarer, however, to see that manager make an investment that exemplifies all of the talk.

While it’s broadly considered an alternative asset class, there are still traditional and non-traditional subsectors to real estate. Both have their idiosyncratic features, and both are becoming increasingly attractive to investors across the entire spectrum.

It will be brief, geographically limited and may not come at all, but if SQM Research’s prognostications are again correct there may be reason for aspiring property buyers to smile early next year.

In real estate, investors need to think more broadly than the traditional sectors of office buildings and shopping centres. Digital infrastructure and industrial property are one way to update the portfolio.

The nation’s rental crisis is deepening, with available dwellings across major cities at just one per cent and the asking price for rents reaching eye-watering levels. According to SQM, seasonal factors are also coming into play.

After a minor blip in 2022 residential property prices are once again soaring to new heights, driven largely by the asking price for houses in major capital cities. But not all is gold for sellers in the country.

It may not be a boom, but the marked increase in new listings, total listings and aggregate asking price for properties across the country in September reflects a healthy spring market according to the researcher.

Despite facing rising interest rates, a higher cost of capital and concerns about their borrowing base, non-bank lenders have made their place in the Australian economy in moments like this, when funding is needed and otherwise hard to get, says Thinktank’s Jonathan Street.

Rate hikes are causing anxiety for Australian mortgage holders, with new research showing seven out of 10 worry about missing repayments. As large numbers of fixed-rate mortgages expire, analysts say distressed property selling is likely to pick up from its thus-far benign levels.

The domestic economy is reaching a tipping point, says SQM Research’s Louis Christopher, with the property market only a step behind. Valuation increases across the country are set to be wound back as unemployment and falls from the fixed rate cliff lead to forced sales.