Real Estate and Property Market News

Apartment prices in the Sunshine Coast town of Noosa Heads have tumbled by a fifth since 2008 as more cracks emerge in a housing market that’s so far escaped the rout seen in the US, UK and Ireland.The median apartment price in the tourism and retiree town 150 kilometers north of Brisbane has slumped 21 per cent in three years to $570,000, according to the Real Estate Institute of Queensland. Sales have more than halved across the Sunshine Coast and the Gold Coast.“We have a very overvalued housing market and even a small adverse shock can be magnified by a large adverse impact on property values,” said Gerard Minack, global developed markets strategist at Morgan Stanley, who asserts Australian home prices are as much as 40 per cent overvalued. “We’re seeing that now in parts of Queensland.”Australia’s housing is the most overvalued in the world, the Economist magazine said last month. The country had the most unaffordable homes among English-speaking nations, with the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast markets near the top, according to a January report by consulting company Demographia, which compared 325 housing markets in seven developed economies.