What's behind the banks approach to LVR policy?

Image courtesy of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand

It is now 10 months since the Reserve Bank implemented its LVR policy, the macro-prudential tool designed to bring a cooling effect to what was clearly a heated property market, especially in Auckland. 

Ten months in which the property market has seen a significant turnaround. The market was already loosing momentum during the winter of 2013, having seen over two and a half years of volume growth when sales had risen on a moving annual total from 55,000 to 80,000.

However the impact of the LVR policy by the Reserve Bank in October last year effectively stalled the engine of the property market. From a peak of 80,677 in October last year the annualised total of property sales has already fallen to 75,637 and year-on-year monthly growth has been negative since October plummeting to a 20% fall in April.

Prior to the implementation of the LVR policy limiting lending above 80% loan-to-value to 10% of the total loan pool of the retail banks, this higher risk / low deposit sector was accounting for upwards of 25% of the total lending - at least that was what the data released by the Reserve Bank showed for the months of August and September of last year. Now I can fully believe that these months were somewhat inflated as those prospective buyers with low deposits rushed to take advantage before the door closed on these 90% and 95% mortgages.

The make up of the customer base of these high loan-to-value loans is hard to accurately identify. Certainly there would be 1st home buyers, however there is no way that close to 1 in 4 of property buyers were at anytime 1st time buyers, more likely would be a number around 10%. The other customers of these high loan-to-value mortgages would be a mix of investors and speculators. 

Investors like to leverage their purchases allowing them to acquire a portfolio of properties whilst maintaining an available cash pool for future opportunities so they like 90+% loan-to-value mortgages - the low deposit multiplies the appreciation of the property in relation to their return on investment.

Speculators also like high loan-to-value mortgages as it frees up cash for property renovations and improvements without having to constantly go back to the bank for progress requests for additional funding - speeding up their process of renovation and subsequent sale. 

There is no doubt these 3 segments of the property market were active in the the period of 2011/2012 as these 3 groups and particularly the latter two are generally good at reading the market and getting in quick before the market rises and then sticking or flicking (in the case of speculators) as the market ramps up.

The subsequent months since October of last year have shown a significant slowing of the lending to these 3 segments.

As the chart shows the subsequent months (with the exception of October) has seen the retail banks lend considerably less than their allowable quota of 10% of all loans (based on a 3 month moving average). 

Now here is the question. How complicated is it for the major retail banks to manage the lending to optimise this segment of the market whilst at the same time ensure that they do not breach the 10% threshold?

You would think that given retail banks make profits from lending rather than hoarding they would be keen to continue to lend high loan-to-value mortgages to these customers based on the situation that if they did not, then some other bank might, after all they do operate in a highly competitive marketplace. Certainly the banks have advanced computer systems, modelling capability and staff to be able to manage that threshold day-by-day and hour-by-hour to ensure that they leant exactly 9.9% of their loan book each month. So why is it that over the course of the past 10 months instead of lending $3.9 billion of high loan-to-value mortgages they have only leant $2.7 billion? - they have in effect collectively denied themselves the opportunity of lending an extra $128 million per month for 10 months!

The answer to the question may lie in two alternate scenarios:

Scenario 1 - Banks hide behind Reserve Bank

Retail Banks despite their commercial imperative are conservative businesses and they mitigate risk. They also operate within a highly regulated industry. Their objective is to defray risk by ideally lending to low risk borrowers at higher rates than they pay to depositors on safe assets. Now property, especially residential property is generally regarded as a low risk asset. However the past decade has taught us all to regard nothing as low risk. Whilst the worst of the excesses of the sub-prime mortgage market was never close to our shores, the ripple effect was felt and has created a sense of caution in the banking industry. 

The Reserve Bank action in implementing its LVR policy effectively provided the retail banks with a legitimate escape card to which all of them could with one voice state that prospective customers should take more responsibility for the asset they wanted to buy by having a greater deposit than the traditional 10% or 5%. In one fell swoop the retail banks managed to avoid a great chunk of risk. Sure the impact was a collective loss of lending opportunity but given the favourable underlying economic conditions and the fact that the impact fell evenly across all banks there could be argued a view that the banks collectively were happy to shave a small amount off their earnings for a significant reduction in risk.

This is merely a hypothesis but one that to me, has a degree of logic, I am not an economist but I feel there could be a part of the rationale at work within the retail banking industry over this issue.

Scenario 2 - Banks can’t sell these high Loan-to-value mortgages

An alternative scenario is one that I have not heard voiced, so I’ll give it a go!

There is actually insufficient demand to fulfil the supply side opportunity of high loan-to-value mortgages at the current 10% threshold. 

This logic relies heavily on a recursive argument that the impact of the announcement of the implementation of the LVR policy certainly can be seen as having a rush-for-the-door effect before the 1st October deadline and that mild panic matched to a clear media messages after the fact that banks were becoming highly restrictive of such high loan-to value mortgages would have had a dampening effect on demand.

That dampened demand certainly lead to a slowing of sales, which was quickly reported in the media, which in turn lead to talk of the deflation of any property bubble, which whilst in principle a signal that should send a message of comfort to the market, actually caused a reaction from a core target market for these loans (being primarily investors and speculators) who believing that the market had peaked. They then judged that this was the time to exit the market, either through consolidating their portfolio or selling properties. This action suddenly and significantly depressed this segment of the market, possibly from a level of 15% - 20% of the market down to 5% of the market.

Add to this behaviour another key issue of the Reserve Bank data as presented in the charts and numbers - the total value of mortgages each month as reported by the Reserve Bank is defined as ‘Total New Commitments’ - this sum $4,499 million in the case of June is the total value of all new written mortgages and includes refinance mortgages, especially including a significant component of moving from floating to fixed rate mortgages.

The fact is over the past 10 months and especially the past 6 months with the clear signals of impending OCR increases the residential mortgage market has transitioned back to fixed term mortgages. This will have driven the total of 'new commitments' and therefore will have had a depressing factor on the percentage of high loan-to-value mortgages.

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So having presented the two scenarios I take the view that what we have seen in the market is probably a combination of both scenarios. Banks like to negate risk, it is highly probable that investors and speculators have moved to take a back-seat int he market and the re-mortgaging factor has also been at play.

The only party therefore who have been a pawn in these moves has been true first home buyers who have been significantly effected by the LVR policy and also by rising interest rates. As to whether they are heading back into the market as witnessed and reported in the media, I doubt it and sadly there is no accurate data to back this up.

Auckland property prices - so much data!

There are now 6 separate sets of property price measures for the Auckland market. All of which are seeking to provide an insight into the trend of price across our largest city. This barrage of statistics published in our daily newspaper is enough to confuse at best, and paralyse at worst, the most ardent of property buyer / seller / investor and even agents!

Here was how the first 2 weeks of July appeared in the Herald:

2 July: Barfoot & Thompson - Auckland's biggest real estate agency has this morning released sales data for June, showing a slight decline in sales volumes but average sale prices up $11,088 in the 30 days - which equates to a daily price rise of $369.60.

7 July: QV - QV said the Auckland region as a whole had increased 2.7 per cent over the past three months and 12.3 per cent year on year. 

14 July: Realestate.co.nz - The country's largest house sales website showed Auckland's asking price hit a new all-time record of $732,240 last month.

14 July: REINZ - The stratified median housing price index showed that in Auckland, prices rose 1.6 per cent in the month

Fair to say that an average person could walk away from reading these reports from the first 2 weeks of the month with a sense of confusion as to which set of data to trust and belief. Sure they all point to rising prices and some speak to hitting a peak, but the margin of increase varies considerably as does the indication of a trend.

Charting these separate measures produces a chart that is worthy of some analysis and commentary.

First let me explain the format of the chart. All of the price data has been indexed to a base of January 2008 = 100 and all monthly data has been computed on a 12 month moving average which makes it easier to view in terms of trends and also excludes the seasonality that impacts all property stats.

As you can see there is a fairly significant disparity between the highest index in June (REINZ median price at 136 as against the lowest being the Realestate.co.nz Asking price at 126. Equally as you will see the path of the index through the property crash in 2008/9 saw some of the measures drop by 10% (QV) whilst others barely dipped into negative (REINZ median price).

Examining each of these as to their composition provides a method of evaluating the value and relevancy of each.

1. Realestate.co.nz Asking Price

This measure is actually the odd-one-out within this group as it measures the advertised price or advertised search price of property coming onto the market, whereas the other sets of data analyse the outcome of sales. A noticeable aspect of this measure is 'consumer sentiment' which tends to result in over estimated values in down-turns and under estimated values in up-turns.

This may seem counter-intuitive as you would expect to see over estimation of value - the 'over-inflated expectation of sellers' in bubbly markets as we have been in in Auckland. The reality though is that whilst the vendors may genuinely have inflated expectation, their agents tend to price for search online at more conservative levels as we have seen recently.

So tracking the path of the index of Realestate.co.nz Asking Price shows it currently tracking at the lowest of the 6 indexes over the past 6 years.

2. Barfoot & Thompson Average Sales Price / Median Sales Price

The data from Barfoot & Thompson whilst not reflective of the whole of Auckland is more timely than the others and with close to 40% share of the Auckland market and representation in all suburbs, does afford it credibility.

The average sale price though is an imperfect measure of property prices as it is open to skew if the composition of sales in a month changes significantly. For this reason Barfoot & Thompson has started publishing a median price which is a more statistically valid measure of property prices. It is though interesting to see that the median price has crept ahead of the average price over the past 2 years. This situation would tend to occur when sales volumes of extreme high value properties slows in proportion  to other segments of the market. This though would seem to be contrary to the data which shows $2m+ properties have doubled in each of the past 2 years, whilst sales of sub$400k priced properties have fallen off. More likely is a situation where the majority of sales in the $500,000 to $1,000,000 bracket have edged up significantly driving that median from $450,000 to $625,000 in the space of just over 3 years.

3. REINZ Median Sales Price / Stratified Median Sales Price

The data collated by the Real Estate Institute is the most comprehensive and timely data in that it aggregates sales records from its members as licensed real estate agents who account for around 90% of all transactions each year. The data is of unconditional contracts and thereby is recorded closer to the date of transaction than settlements registered at LINZ and utilised by QV for their data. 

The REINZ median sales price has been reported monthly since 1992 and is one of the most complete data sets for the whole country. However as presented in this chart, the index is the highest of all the data sets presenting what from outside would seem to be an optimistic view of property prices as it hardly reported a dip in sales price in 2008/9. 

The reason that the median price in Auckland as reported by REINZ is so out of kilter from the other metrics is exactly the reason why REINZ implemented the Stratified Median Sales Price in 2010. The Stratified price index makes adjustments within the market to ensure the composition of suburb sales is representative when the market tends to skew towards certain suburbs as has been the case in Auckland over this 7 year period. For this reason the Stratified price index provides a much more accurate representation of true price movements and the trend on the chart certainly bears this out.

4. QV

The data from QV is in many ways the most accurate, yet it does suffer somewhat from lagging the other data sets, requiring as it does the data from property settlements and title changes to be registered at LINZ. Something that largely happens online nowadays and thereby removes some process time delays.

The data is not reported as a median or stratified median but is analysed to assess the actual sales price of each property sold against the estimated property valuation that QV has on record for every property in NZ. So their system and the resulting valuation index is a closer evaluation of the trend in core property values and takes into account the improvements and developments that are undertaken on properties that do materially effect the value of a property which are not accounted for in any of the other data sets and can cause skewing of data. This factor has been a driving component of the Auckland property market for many years as the pace of gentrification of the inner suburbs has seen extensive renovations drive enormous price movements. 

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One of the benefits though of these numerous data sets of property prices in Auckland is the ability to see the variance between these data sets on the chart and also to provide the ability to visually see the the set or sets of data that are in someways the midpoint and therefore the most likely to be the most accurate. From my reading of the data this would be the QV valuation data and the REINZ Stratified median price. Both of these data sets benefits from computational analysis by qualified and trusted professionals. In the case of the REINZ Stratified price with the assistance and guidance of the Reserve Bank and in the case of QV the professional teams of valuers and the resources and skills of Core Logic.

What I find very interesting is that it would appear that the Barfoot & Thompson median price data tracks very accurately to the trend of these other two. It may still be a bit too early to tell for sure, but the indication is clear. This could well be the result that Barfoot & Thompson sales are a true representative sample of Auckland property without extreme outliers.

The shortage of property myth

It has been a constant refrain of the property market commentary for many years - "there is a shortage of property on the market"; "property shortages driving up prices" etc.

The reality is that compared to 2008 there is a shortage.

In that year there were 163,488 properties listed for sale and sales totalled 56,071 indicating a clearance rate of just 34%. Compare those figures to the latest data showing that in the past 12 months just 130,307 new properties listings were added to the market. Sales over the past 12 months to June 2014 have totalled just 76,637 indicating a clearance rate of 57%. Simply put more of the properties that are listed today are selling than in 2008 and the number of properties listed is down significant;y.

However as with all statistics, every conclusion you draw is influenced by the data set you choose. 2008 as we all know was the start of the Global Financial Crisis and the worst year for NZ property for many generations. Judge anything against those days and the picture will be skewed.

If on the other hand you line up the data for the first 6 months of each of the past 7 years for which data is available, the picture is very different. (Note there is no listings data prior to 2007).

Total property listings for the first 6 months of each of the past 6 years have barely changed. This year, total listings have reached 63,436 properties listed for sale; hardly any change from last year or the prior year, 2010 saw a bit of a rise in listings. So to say we have a shortage of listings is stretching the truth.

The fact is that we now operate in a very stable supply market. Much as real estate agents may wish to see more properties on the market, the fact is levels in 2007 and 2008 are purely historic fact not a target to be achieved.

Even in Auckland where the pressure in the property market is judged to be felt the worst, listings are barely changed comparing this year to last or in fact any of the past 6 years - the Auckland property market is experiencing a steady supply of new listings. So steady that you could be fairly confident that the balance of 2014 will see a further 22,000 properties listed between July and December.

Clearly the number of new listings alone does not tell the whole story of the property market, especially in regard to pressure of demand on even a stable supply and so to the above stats you need to represent the level of property sales as in the chart below.

Across the country in the first 6 months of this year total sales have reached 36,164 down 11% as compared to the first 6 months of 2013, whereas listings have barely changed. In terms of a clearance rate in these first 6 months of this year the total sales of 36,164 represent, as noted earlier 57% of the new listings. A year ago the figure based on the first half of 2013 was 62% indicating that there is less success in property sales and therefore clearly no shortage.

Focusing on the Auckland market there is no doubt that here the clearance rate of property is far higher. For the first 6 months of this year a total of 15,090 properties have been sold with a total of 21,002 new listings - a clearance rate of 72%. The same time a year ago the clearance rate was 78% indicating the easing in any pressure in this market over past year with that steady supply and slowing sales - therefore no shortage! 

Property websites becoming more and more valuable

Imagine a property website dedicated to the Christchurch market, not the whole of Canterbury, but just serving the Christchurch market, a population of around 350,000 people. A nice tidy little business especially if it was the website of choice for buyers, sellers and renters in Christchurch.

Now imagine if the news tomorrow stated that this website was just bought by Fairfax media for $53,000,000!

In effect this is what happened today, not in NZ but in Australia as Fairfax owned Domain (the second player in the Australian market behind Realesatate.com.au) acquired the website of AllHomes. It serves the Australian Capital Territory - a region of 381,000 people. 

The website is the leader in this market. It is forward thinking as it has moved beyond a subscription service to charge a listing fee of not $159 per listing as Trade Me is now charging but upwards of A$600 a listing.

Certainly Fairfax is paying a fair premium to achieve consolidation in this market in order for it to better challenge the supremacy of Realestate.com.au. It will have to be seen as to the success it has in running the site as a separate business before integration into the Domain stable.

Benchmarking this acquisition is difficult as city specific property portals are rare. However on a population basis this acquisition values the Allhomes business at $139 per person in ACT. This compares with a current valuation for the REA Group which owns Realestate.com.au edging over $6 billion which equates to $277 per head of population in Australia. Both of these far surpass the collective value though of the two powerhouse property portals in the UK Rightmove and Zoopla which with a combined market capitalisation of over $6 billion equates to a value per head of population of just under $100.