Daily Briefing, Thursday February 21, 2008

But firstly we have news out overnight that New Zealanders are less confident about rising house prices, but they actually think now is a better time to buy.
This seems a strange result from ASB's Housing confidence survey for the three months to January.
It's worth looking at the details.
The proportion expecting higher prices has fallen considerably. It's now down at 28% from 36% in the last survey. The proportion expecting lower prices has increased to 28% from 24%. So the net result is that 1% expect higher prices.
The expectations for interest rates are interesting too. 55% expect higher rates, while 8% expect rates to fall. That's more pessimistic than many economists, who reckon official interest rates are on hold for now, although it's worth noting that wholesale interest rates, which are the ones that drive fixed mortgage rates, have been rising for the last 6 months.
But the most interesting thing from this survey was the answers to the question about whether now was a good time to buy or sell. You'd expect that with more people expecting price falls and most people expecting higher interest rates that that wouldn't be many people who think now is the good time to buy.
But instead the survey found that more than a quarter of people think now is a good time to buy. That's actually up from 19% in the previous quarter. And the percentage who thought now was a bad time to buy actually fell to 27% from 37%.
So here we have more people believing prices will fall, most people believing interest rates will rise, but more people believing now is a good time to buy.
That implies the belief about house prices never falling too much over the long term is hard to break. My reading of this is that people see a little dip in prices and believe that creates an opportunity to buy before there's a turnaround and prices get back on their merry march higher.
Our belief at interest.co.nz is that the belief about house prices not really falling is wrong. House prices are 30% over valued and will likely fall that much in the next year or two. Now is definitely not a good time to buy.

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