With residential property prices ten times the average salary in Melbourne and Sydney, U.S. forecaster Harry Dent expects the Australian market to mirror the collapse witnessed in the California.
When house prices reached ten times income levels in California they signalled the peak that turned into the crash, and Harry Dent predicts the same future awaits the Australian market. In conversation with personal finance editor John Collett and business columnist David Potts, Dent, an economist and demographer, suggests that prices could halve.
The 2013 median house price in Sydney reached a record high of $763,169. Dr Andrew Wilson, senior economist with Australian Property Monitors, rejected Dent's conclusions stating that prices in Sydney would continue to increase by 15% over the next year. Wilson added that this growth was unsustainable would probably slow but that it was "a long way short of a catastrophic fall in house prices" as the "preconditions [we]re not there".
Economists Christopher Joye and Steve Keen agreed. Joye stating that interest rates were unlikely to stay at such low levels indefinitely and that this would slow the market down, while Keen predicts that the market will continue to grow for at least another two years.
Read the full story: Property prices will plummet, says specialist
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