house prices

People often ask us what investment style is Ophir Asset Management? We respond we are style agnostic, if we believe there is money to be made buying a company that is growing significantly we will invest in it. Likewise, if we believe there is an unloved company that will see... Show More

In assessing whether to get long or short residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS), we undertake a great deal of quantitative analysis, including revaluing the homes that protect these bonds at regular intervals and developing globally unique RMBS default and prepayment indices. (Regular readers will know that we exited most of our... Show More

Today I argue that the smartest thing RBA governor Phil Lowe could do is get the banks to cut rates for him---preserving his monetary policy ammunition for a real crisis---and show that substantial reductions in bank funding costs might enable our largest lenders to do precisely that. I also reveal... Show More

This week the RBA quietly admitted that low interest rates have played a big part in the rise in Australian house prices. This comes after years of denying the obvious. I say quietly admitted as it came in a “research discussion paper” on its website written by two of its... Show More

In my column today I write "if only the RBA had its brilliant new research on the impact of interest rates on house prices back in 2013 when I warned them that their easy money policy would blow a huge housing bubble, as it subsequently did" (click on that link... Show More

Coolabah developed the world's first compositionally-adjusted, or hedonic, regression-based index of RMBS default rates, covering all prime deals that Bloomberg reports on (you can download the paper here). We update this index monthly, and the results are enclosed below. Show More

After promising to enact the Royal Commission's recommendations to the letter before the report was even released, and then saying it accepted all the recommendations "in principle" after the report was published (whatever that means), Labor have now rejected outright one of the Royal Commission's most important findings: that mortgage... Show More

In my column today I reveal that Australia is now officially experiencing the biggest house price falls on record in almost 40 years: home values across the five largest capital cities have officially fallen 8.3 per cent from their late 2017 peak according to the top index provider, CoreLogic, which... Show More

Here I argue that anyone who tells you they know what's driving markets right now is lying or fooling themselves, which begets opportunity (click on that link to read the full column or AFR subs can click here). Excerpts enclosed: Show More

If house prices are falling as rapidly as some headlines impute, can we expect this to impact AREIT investors? Let’s begin by looking at the facts, rather than the headlines. Housing demand and supply ebbs and flows. Because of the lower barriers to entry there’s often volatility in residential housing. Show More