"The Australian housing market is in the twilight of an incredible boom that has been fuelled by record low mortgage rates," said Gareth Aird, CBA's head of Australian economics, on Monday.
Based on data from property analytics company, CoreLogic, the report forecasted that Australia's property market would grow by 22 percent over 2021, in 2022 this yearly growth was predicted to simmer down to just 7 percent, curtailing in the latter half of that year.
In 2023, a 10 percent fall was forecast, led by the capital cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Hobart, the same cities that have been experiencing the highest levels of runaway growth.
Aird attributed the predicted drop to two factors including rising borrowing rates, as set by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), and stagnating wage growth.
A historical report from CoreLogic showed that over the last 40 years, house prices in Australia had grown three times as fast as wages.
This has never been more pronounced than during the pandemic, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), which noted that in the year to September 2021, wages in Australia grew by just 2.2 percent, or 10 times less than the housing market.
This coupled with predictions that the RBA would raise its cash lending by late 2023. For this, private banks have already begun to increase lending interest rates in anticipation, which has further tightened home buyers purchasing power.
Despite this approaching "twilight", Aird maintained that the drop would be a correction and not a crash.
"A cooling market is not the same thing as a falling market. Prices are still rising at a reasonable pace," he said.
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