Reserve Bank sees “no major problems” as 45,000 famlies slide into the red

At least 45,000 Australian families are now in arrears with their home loan repayments, according  to the Reserve Bank.

The bank also admits that home loan repayments are swallowing more of Australian family incomes than ever before. purchase.

In fact, it has has calculated that a typical Australian family, buying a mid priced house now, would have to set aside close to  40 per cent of its disposable income, to meet the repayments.

The top safe level was once thought to be no more than 30 per cent.

Yet the Reserve Bank also says that “from a macroeconomic perspective, there do not appear to be any major problems here.”

Its Deputy Governor also describes the situation with arrears on home loan repayments as “relatively benign.”

Mr Battelino does admit that rents are high. But he says that happened, largely, because they have been so low, in the past, that there was little incentive in Australia to build rental housing.

He concedes, though, that “financial pressures” for new home owners are “concentrated” in particular areas, such as Westerm Sydney.

And he says there are “significant pockets” in which family budgets are “relatively tight,”
Mr Battelino says debt servicing ratios, in those areas, are “relatively high.”

He admits, too,  that the proportion of families, in those areas, who behind in their  home loans loan repayments is  higher than for the Australian community as a whole.

However Battelino also signallled that the Reserve Bank is not, unduly, worried about the big bite that home loan repayments are now taking out of Australisignalan family budgets.

He said  the 30 per cent safe mark had been set in 1991 aand much had changed since then.

Incomes had increased so much, that typical families could now spend bigger slices of what they received on home loan repayments and still maintain satisfactory standards of living.There are now signs, though, that many Australians are not as comfortable and relaxed about the nation’s property market, as the Reserve Bank seems to be.

Buyers are now so scarce in Melbourne for example, that local real estate agents are repprting  significant falls in house prices.

The once-hot  housing market in Canberra, too, is now said to have cooled.