Analysis: ABS December 2022 Housing Data

This post focuses on housing lending to owner-occupiers.

You can find more information on business and housing lending in the ABA lending dashboards.

Please note this is all ‘original’ data and not ‘seasonally adjusted’. This is due to the ‘original’ series having more values (i.e. internal refinancing). Therefore figures may differ slightly to what is seen in other analysis as seasonally adjusted data is often used when assessing trends. If you ever want to know the difference between original and seasonally adjusted data just come and ask ????

Short Summary: Overall, the data shows that new lending continues to track sideways, reversing some of the increased volumes seen in 2020-21. Refinancing volumes continue to exceed completely new lending as customers increasingly refinancing with a new lender, with twice as many borrowers (150,000) refinancing with a new lender as with their current bank (70,000).

December data shows that monthly housing lending continues its general late-2021 / 2022 trend of tracking sideways both in number and value of new loans (Figure 1). This comes after a steep climb in lending during the low-interest period of 2020 / 2021.

Figure 1: New lending, Owner-occupiers, Number and value ($m), July 2019 – December 2022

Digging beneath the numbers a bit further, we can see that refinancing is now more common than banks writing entirely new loans (Figures 2a and 2b).

This tells us that Australians are shopping around, rather than getting new loans to buy houses or fund renovations. The last time we saw refinancing overtake new lending was back in early 2020, but it only occurred for a few months.

Figure 2a: New lending, Owner-occupiers, Number, July 2019 – December 2022

Figure 2b: New lending, Owner-occupiers, Value ($m), July 2019 – December 2022

Digging even further we can now see that external refinancing has been at record highs since May 2022, coinciding with RBA’s first cash rate rise (Figures 3a & 3b). In the last six months of 2022,  we saw more than 150,000 Australians switch to another mortgage provider and more than 70,000 refinance with their own bank.

Figure 3a: Refinancing, Owner-occupiers, Number, July 2019 – December 2022

Figure 3b: Refinancing, Owner-occupiers, Value ($m), July 2019 – December 2022

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