Feature Article—Change to
housing finance series
The Australian Bureau of Statistics
(ABS) has, for nearly thirty years, collected statistics on housing finance
commitments to owner occupiers. These have been published monthly in Housing
Finance for Owner Occupation, ABS, catalogue number 5609.0. The value
series for total commitments to owner occupiers from this publication
has been reproduced for many years in this Monthly Economic and Social
Indicators (MESI) publication and more recently in MESI e-data, available
on-line for people connected to the parliamentary network.
With the
release of March 2004 data (in May 2004), the housing finance publication
introduced data on housing finance for investment housing and provided
the data back to January 1985. With the inclusion of these data, the name
of the ABS monthly publication changed to Housing Finance (still
catalogue number 5609.0).
Finance for
investment housing accounted for 13 per cent of total—owner occupied plus
investment—housing in 1985–86, the first full-year of investment housing
finance data. In the most recent financial year (2003–04), it accounts
for 38 per cent of the total.
Given the
move away from looking only at owner occupied housing, from this edition
of MESI the housing finance series that will be shown is for total housing
finance commitments. In 2003-04, owner occupied housing finance commitments
were $124 033 million compared with $199 902 million for total
housing finance commitments. Figure 1 shows the monthly owner occupied
and total series.
MESI
Table 5.3
Monthly Economic
and Social Indicators Table 5.3 shows:
- monthly data on total housing finance
- annual totals of total housing finance
- annual percentage changes in total housing finance.
Monthly data
on value of total housing finance are graphed to show the level and direction
in the series over the past few years.
MESI
e-data Table 5.3
MESI e-data
gives the full historical monthly series for total housing finance which
is available from 1975. As explained above, the total series is owner
occupied housing only for the period October 1975 to December 1984 and
owner occupied plus investment housing from January 1985. These data are
only available for people connected to the parliamentary network.
This feature was prepared by Stephen Barber.
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