Is the housing market about to turn?

We may have reached a tipping point in house prices. There are signs globally that the Covid-induced surge in prices is abating and that other forces - the high cost of living and interest rates - may soon act as a restraint on buyers, potentially pushing the market into reverse. New Zealand house prices experienced their biggest quarterly drop in a decade and forecasters there are predicting a 10 per cent drop in values over the year. Similar to Ireland, property prices in New Zealand have rocketed over the past decade and affordability has become a major political issue. The Irish property market is still travelling in the other direction for now with annual house price inflation hitting a new pandemic high of 15.3 per cent in February but signs of this softening are emerging. As Davy Stockbrokers noted its latest economic report, there was a fall in the median premium over the asking price in the first quarter of 2022, the first for some time. A cooling of some sort was perhaps inevitable but a price reversal, should it occur, is unlikely to unwind the appreciation in values we've seen in the past two years. Davy expects property price inflation this year to average 7 per cent.

As the Central Bank's two-day webinar on mortgage measures, which concluded yesterday, heard repeatedly, there are multiple factors driving house prices, interest rates, supply, population growth, immigration, economic growth, remote working, Ukranian refugees. And while loan-to-value and loan-to-income curbs have limited price and credit growth and increased the resilience of the banking sector here and in other countries, they've done little to address the affordability challenge. In fairness, that wasn't the objective. Nonetheless former Central Bank Patrick Honohan admitted that the rapid rise in house prices relative to income had made the rule limiting buyers to borrowing just 3½ times their income "problematic". By the same token he wondered if increasing this ceiling to four or five might just end up increasing prices further, which is cold comfort for those trying to buy. Those wishing to buy can only hope the straws in the wind turn out to be something more substantial.