The Sunshine Coast’s red-hot property market is showing signs of cooling, with house prices falling for the first time in just over three years, a new report shows.
Key points:
- The median home price in the region is still a million dollars
- New real estate report shows home and unit prices down for first time in just over three years
- Housing crisis has left up to 14,000 people homeless, says real estate research analyst
Unit prices have also had their biggest drop, according to quarterly data for June published today by real estate firm Domain.
The domain’s head of research and economics, Nicola Powell, said house prices fell by 2.4% in the last quarter.
“It’s been such a long period of rising prices,” Dr Powell said.
“[While] 2.4 percent in three months seems like quite a drop, when you look at prices over the past year, they are almost 21 percent higher over the last 12 months.
“What it shows is that the peak growth rate has passed and the rate of growth is slowing down.”
Nicola Powell says house prices had been rising steadily. (Supplied: Linkedin)
Dr Powell said the figures showed the sharpest rise in house prices in the region since 2003 was coming to an abrupt halt.
But despite the drop, median house prices on the Sunshine Coast were still in the million dollar mark.
“Median house prices remain very high but have eased from last quarter’s record high of $1.025 billion,” Dr Powell said.
“It’s the same for unit prices. They were down 1.8 percent in the June quarter and are at $655,000.”
The affordability crisis leaves 14,000 people homeless
The drop in prices will come as cold comfort to those displaced by the region’s housing crisis.
A real estate research analyst says 14,000 people are now homeless on the Sunshine Coast due to a combination of high rents in the area and a tight supply of rental housing.
The average house price is in the one million dollar mark. (Provided by: RE/MAX Property Nambour)
The Direct Collective, a real estate research and development company, has been studying census data to get a better idea of how serious the homelessness crisis is in the region.
Research director Mal Cayley said it showed more than 3,500 rental properties have returned to the market as owner-occupied homes.
“So if you take this census data into account, as well as last year, we have an undersupply of 5,500 to 7,500 rental properties on the Sunshine Coast,” he said.
“That means 14,000 people have been displaced in our community, because we don’t have enough supply.”
Mal Cayley says there are solutions. (Provided by: The Direct Collective)
Mr Cayley said he has heard heartbreaking stories from those who suddenly found themselves homeless for the first time.
“Because we’re talking about this issue, we’re being bombarded,” he said.
“It’s really hard to handle the amount of stories of people couch surfing, of families sleeping in cars, of homelessness rising for the first time. The absolutely desperate nature of how bad this crisis really is.” .
Costa needs 4,000 homes built per year
Cayley said the region needed to build the equivalent of one new suburb every year for the next 20 years to keep up with population growth.
“I think the forecasts are underestimating the number of people,” he said.
“We need more than one suburb a year, every year, delivered to meet the number of people who are turning up on the Sunshine Coast.
Development is necessary to keep up with population growth. (Provided by Peter Wise)
“It’s probably more like 4,200 new homes a year that we need.”
The company said it was preparing to launch a community housing strategy in the next fortnight, in a bid to end homelessness in the region over the next decade.
The HEUS initiative, a home for everyone under the sun, will work with community groups to lobby all three levels of government.
“What we need is a whole-of-government, whole-of-community approach and there are ways and means to change the problem,” Cayley said.
“So we have to look at everything from government policies to land tax, stamp duty, complex planning rules and how they prevent investors from adding to supply.”
Cayley said the council needed to develop an emergency action plan to address housing undersupply issues, similar to the strategy recently launched by Noosa Council.
The council is dealing with homelessness. (ABC News: Giulio Saggin)
A Sunshine Coast Council spokesman said it remained committed to working in partnership with all levels of government to improve access to homelessness services and to address housing affordability issues.
“The Council is reaching out to stakeholders to begin the development of a housing and homelessness action plan,” the spokesman said.
They said the preparation of the new planning scheme would also take into account future housing needs for the region, but would not be fast-tracked.
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