ANZ's Late Price Guess

Hotspotting

ANZ, the worst forecaster on property price outcomes in the nation, has just published its forecasts for what will happen with house prices in 2024.

Yes, that’s right. They’ve published, in October, forecasts for house prices this year, a couple of months before the end of the year.

Why have they done this? Because it’s the only chance ANZ has of getting it right with its property price forecasts.

Essentially what it has done with these “predictions” is take the existing situation and extrapolate it two months into the future.

So, you will be amazed to learn that they’re predicting that Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane will lead on price growth in 2024.

You’d pay good money for insights as sharp as that, right?!

The big four banks, collectively, have terrible track records in forecasting property price outcomes.

They are ALWAYS – and I do mean ALWAYS – wrong, but usually they are spectacularly wrong.

But ANZ bank is the worst of them.

At the start of 2024, it predicted house prices would fall across the nation in 2024 – by as much as 15%.

They did the same at the start of 2023 – forecasting massive decline in house prices.

Of course, it’s now clear that they got this horribly, horribly wrong – because they just don’t understand real estate dynamics.

Their reason for expecting prices to collapse in 2023 and again in 2024? Because of high interest rates.

Essentially that’s all they have in their kit bag of real estate knowledge.

Interest rates high or rising? Property prices fall, according to the ANZ mindset.

Except they don’t – and they didn’t.

ANZ has a few problems at the moment. It’s been taken to court, successfully, by federal authorities like ASIC because it’s not only incompetent, it’s an organisation with dodgy ethics.

But once they sort out their legal issues, they might turn their attention to sacking their senior economists who continually pump out ridiculous reports claiming to be research – including absurdities like forecasting property price outcomes for the calendar year, just two months before the end of the year.

The report, rather comically, is titled “Property Insights” – but there is nothing insightful in this report or anything else emanating from ANZ any time in the past several years.