Monthly Hours Worked
In this newsletter we will cover the latest weekly real estate statistics and the latest employment figures.
Sales remained relatively stable over the past week with Perth recording 1010 sales, again just over the 1,000 mark. House sales decreased by 4%, while units sales increased by 11% and vacant land increased by 8%. Listings however continued to increase with Perth recording a 2% increase to 8,313 following on from a 2.4% increase the previous week. Last week we highlighted the recent increasing trend of properties for sale and the graph below shows that trend continuing this week. While we have strong sales figures and increasing listing numbers, it would appear more people are deciding now is the time to buy and sell.
Perth prices increased by 0.3724%, just slightly under the required weekly average of 0.3846% (red line below) to meet Gavan Hegney’s 12 month forecast for a 20% price increase in Perth. While the blue lines, representing the weekly price change, are above the required average and the green trend line is still projecting upwards Perth is on target to meet the 20% growth forecast. Currently, the weekly average price increase since October is 0.2924% and steadily rising.
To finish this week, the latest Australian unemployment figures were overall far better than anticipated. The Australian unemployment rate of 5.8% wasn’t forecast till the end of the year. As regular readers would know, we like to use monthly hours worked to gauge the amount of labour being used. WA’s monthly hours worked dropped by a whopping 4% as shown in the graph below and this initially caused some concern. Checking the unemployment figures, WA’s unemployment rate dropped by 0.1% to 6.0%, so the drop in hours worked was very puzzling until we realised much of WA was in lock down for 5 working days at the start of February. The graph below, and a 1.6% increase in underemployment (people wanting more hours of work), shows the impact on labour output from just a 5 day shutdown. Victoria did two months. Next month we should see a substantial increase.
Next week we will look at the latest ABS migration figures and discuss potential wage increases due to negative overseas migration.
Reproduced with permission from:
Ryan Brierty,
in house economist from Michael Keil @ michaelkeil.com