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Mortgage approvals drop to non-holiday week low

Mortgage approvals drop to non-holiday week low

Both the volume and value of mortgages approvals dropped to non-holiday week lows last week, according to Reserve Bank data.

Reserve Bank figures show 4,686 home loans were approved in the week ending September 10, the first week after the September 4 Canterbury earthquake, valued at NZ$574.3 million. Both the volume and value of approvals in the 13 weeks to September 10 is down almost 26% on the same period of last year.

About 14% of real estate sales since 2000 have been made in Canterbury. However, the latest figures continue trends of the past two to three months which have seen several new non-holiday week lows in the Reserve Bank series that began in October 2003.

At NZ$574.3 million the value of mortgages approved is only a fraction higher than the NZ$578.2 million value of the 4,438 mortgages approved in Easter week, the week to April 9, this year.

 Mortgage approvals can be a useful early indicator of where the housing market might head, given it includes data that is less than 10 days old and approvals now can turn into sales in a few weeks or months time.

The mortgage approval figures do, however, have some caveats. The Reserve Bank defines an approval as a firm commitment to provide credit for the purchase of housing, which has been accepted by the borrower. It says a commitment exists once the home loan application is approved, and a loan contract or letter of offer has been issued to the borrower.

Included in the figures is the refinancing by one bank of other banks customers, any loan where the security changes, and any loan where the liability holder changes.

Excluded is own customer refinance, - the ‘rolling over’ of a fixed rate loan, and its subsequent refinancing, business borrowing where the security is the owner’s home, and the underlying value of a loan being “topped up.” Seven banks respond to the survey representing more than 99% of registered bank lending for housing, and about 94% of total housing lending.

The series, which the Reserve Bank describes as an experimental one, began with data for the week ended October 31, 2003.

Mortgage approvals

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Source: RBNZ
Source: RBNZ
Source: RBNZ

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10 Comments

 

The game is up for all to see...an economy on the ropes...a Reserve Bank looking more like faulty towers by the day....the peasantry starting to realise what bloody idiots they have been chasing each other round the neighbourhood in a property splurge that has made the banks rich and them poor....a rapidly growing fiscal hole that English knows dam well is set to get worse and stay deep for decades...a rural community that is being farmed by the banks!...the cost of living set to shoot higher with electricity and insurance and council rates all plus higher gst....

The mortgage data is not lying...we are stuffed...but hey the spin and BS industry is "chugging along....singing a song....more munnnneeeee"

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So Faulty Towers boss Bollard has earned his massive salary once again...all hold while the consumers and retailers display caution....or in plain English the economy is dead in the water because it is falling into a fiscal hole and an Elephant of debt has jumped in on top.

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Why isn't this guy famous?

 

Saturday, June 13, 2009 Smart Growth? BEFORE YOU CAN HAVE A VISION - YOU MUST FIRST HAVE THE FACTS

By Andrew D. Atkin

 

 

http://andrewatkin.blogspot.com/2009/06/smart-growth.html 

 

Friday, October 2, 2009 Explaining New Zealand's Property Disaster By Andrew D Atkin 

http://andrewatkin.blogspot.com/2009/10/explaining-new-zealands-property.html 

 

 

 
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For what? Being wrong? Or at least, not completely correct?

 

Everyone knows why the bubble occurred (crazed mortgage lending, easy credit, etc) and why it's burst (reverse of previous, etc), so his words are hardly revelatory, and he's simply incorrect when he, like most property developer slime, claims that land use restrictions are at fault.

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Andrew Atkin is a property developer? Come again?

It is bleedin' obvious he is a young feller who understands perfectly well who are the slime (your term) responsible for locking his generation out of home ownership, lumbering them with debt, and driving them into bankruptcy. You totalitarian planning apologists have no shame or ethics whatsoever.  Slime, slime, slime. The property developers are just suckers, collateral damage, compared with your responsibility and your underlying anti-human, pagan, fascist ideology.

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Well Phil, I have to say that the only people I've ever heard screeching for more land to be made available for property development are property developers.

Our landscape is blighted enough as it is by a cancerous suburban sprawl.

Property prices are being knocked back by the loss of free and easy mortgages, and by low average incomes, so there is a high degree of natural correction within the market.

Rather than destroy more of the countryside by covering it with trashy housing developments, we should be hammering the government to implement hefty land and CG taxes.

That will kill the speculative and investment side of residential property development stone dead and prices will collapse even further.

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It never ceases to amaze me in this day and age of "Google Earth", people still harp on about "our countryside being covered in trashy housing development".

FFS, get on Google Earth yourself and take a look. We have hardly started to make a scratch on the surface of the available land.

NZ is about 1.5% urbanised. The whole world is about 2% urbanised.

This is the "post rational" decadent phase of our civilisation. It is worse than a return to pre-rational paganism, with its sacred trees and stuff, because we have no excuse for being so stupid as to believe this Goebbels stuff that people like you trot out. You are no better than Goebbels, you hate all humanity about as much as he hated Jews.

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ffs yourself: Go for a drive around any suburban location (ie a NZ "city", because that's all they are, a giant suburb) and see the ugliness.

There is no shortage of houses, no matter how much the property spruikers like to claim otherwise, and vast numbers of apartments sit empty.

Immigration is obviously not driving demand...nothing is driving demand right now, hence the very long property sale times and falling prices.

Why do we need more property "development"? Because property spruikers believe that somehow it will make them wealthy?

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This proves without a doubt that you negatives, gloomsters and naysayers were completely wrong, and property is booming.

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This is big ... if US mortgage rate increases tipped the sub-primes in 2006/ 07, then reducing net incomes for all will have the same effect on prime loans!

And these tax reductions started in 2001 and 2003.

 

http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aXJuTa_3HuDA&pos=9

 

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