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Real estate behemoth Century 21 believes any move by the RBA to restrict lending simply won’t work.
Speaking at industry breakfast in Sydney yesterday, the company’s owner Charles Tarbey said macroprudential tools, used to slow investor demand, might cool certain pockets of the market but could be ruinous to the market overall.
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Mr Tarbey said a smarter way to cool prices was to merely increase the supply of new homes.
“Those tools that they [are considering] introducing will have a grinding down effect on any free enterprise in that area and it will come back to a government instrument,” Mr Tarbey said.
“The problems we have relate back to supply,” he believed.
“If the supply issue is fixed and the [local government] and the green and red tape issues were resolved and we had a smoother flow of developments through that didn’t take so long to get off the ground, we wouldn’t have this high investor activity like we have.”
He cited the white-hot Sydney market as an example of extreme investor demand bought on by a lack of supply, while in regional areas it was a completely different story.
“If you go out to country towns or further out to regional areas, you don’t see a rush for property there,” he said.
“You don’t see properties going up for auction and people clambering around the place.
“It’s because there is a supply issue in Sydney.”
However, Mr Tarbey said that the market has changed over the past few weeks with more housing stock coming onto the market.
“I think we are starting to see a flattening out of the market across the country,” he said.
“We’ve had four weeks in a row of stock increase.”
