Discovering key drivers of house price growth in eight Australian capital cities:1994-2017

This study adopts the user cost of housing framework and uses dynamic models to identify the key drivers of real house price growth in Australia's eight capital cities between 1994 and 2017. The real mortgage rate and the real investment loan growth rate are found to be significantly associated with real house price growth. A 25 basis points increase in the real mortgage rate will reduce the long-run growth rate of real house price in Sydney by about 0.69 per cent per quarter. A 1 percent increase in investment loan growth per quarter will increase the long-run real house price growth by 0.95 per cent per quarter in Sydney. The results show that investor demands have a lot more influence on house price growth than compared to owner-occupied demands in most Australian capital cities.The study also discovers that the price-to-rent ratio and population growth have strong influences on real house price growth. For most Australian Capital cities, economic factors explain around 50 t0 60 per cent of the variation i the growth rate of house prices.