Monday, July 25, 2016

Australian lenders freezing lending to Asian buyers

Australian lenders freeze housing loans, triggers property funding crisis
The Australian Financial Review reports that Shanghai-based financiers have been complaining that funding of the Chinese clients from Australian banks were frozen. Their only recourse is to foreclose the property or borrow at usurious interest rates from private financiers.
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The move affected almost all his clients waiting for completion of properties in Australia which are mostly flats in the Melbourne commercial business districts, Yin says. Most of these apartments are sold off-the-plan in which purchasers buy the units on a pre-selling with a deposit and complete payments when the property is finished. But it needs a second valuation and lender’s financing commitment.

Brexit London house prices could fall 30%, high end properties 50%

Brexit could cut London house prices by more than 30%, says bank
Société Générale added: “We see a classic housing bubble in London and Brexit as the trigger for the correction … Given the current ratio of prices to incomes in London, a price correction of even 40-50% in the most expensive London boroughs does not seem impossible.”
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London property prices have more than doubled since they began to recover from the financial crisis in 2009. Last month, the average London house price was £472,000 – 12 times average London earnings, compared with a long-term average of six times, Société Générale said.

Thursday, July 14, 2016

Leak reveals secret tax crackdown on foreign-money real estate deals in Vancouver

Leak reveals secret tax crackdown on foreign-money real estate deals in Vancouver
But the employee feared the sweep would prove inadequate. “Sure, they’ve upped the numbers because it’s hitting the papers,” they said. But on average, they estimated, each redeployed income auditor would only be able to conduct 10 to 12 audits per year – about 500 or 600 in total. “This is nothing,” compared to the likely scale of the cheating, they said.
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Census data from 2011 has previously shown that 25,000 households in the City of Vancouver spent more on their housing costs than their entire declared income, with these representing 9.5 per cent of all households.
But far from being impoverished, such households were concentrated in some of the city’s most expensive neighbourhoods, where homes sell for multi-million-dollar prices.