Abstract
This is the first edition in BMI' s new series of reports on real estate
sectors around the world. We have sought to incorporate data and insights
from our reports on infrastructure and commercial banking - as well as our
own forecasts for the economies of the various countries that we survey.
Key issues - Australia
We suggest that the following are the key issues to monitor for the real estate sector in the coming year or so:
- The absolute level of bank lending in Australia, given that the availability of finance appears to have been the main challenge in the recent past.
- Any pickup in the moribund construction sector, given that this has been the major positive for the country.
- Any clear sign in improvement in bureaucracy and the legal system. Clarification of the trend in commercial office rents in Sydney.
- Continued solid, but unspectacular, growth in residential property prices.
These conclusions are based on our
proprietary Real Estate/Construction Business Environment Rating (RECBER),
the component factors of which we discuss in detail. The conclusions are also
set against recent conditions in the commercial office market - for which
we have used office rents in major cities as a proxy, and in the
residential real estate market - for which we have used housing prices as a
proxy. A major trend throughout all our real rstate reports is that,
mainly due to the global financial crisis, access to funding will be more
important than usual. Accordingly, we have incorporated overviews of
conditions in the commercial banking sector - both globally and in the
region of each country. We have also looked at the issues that will drive
the fortunes of real estate investment trusts (REITs) over the coming
months.
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