Chinese buyers 'to benefit from APRA crackdown on local borrowers'

Mortgage broker John Symond says he is worried that the APRA investor home loan lending crackdown will have unintended consequences given the huge increase in non-Australian residents buying property.

"I am just worried that there is not going to be unintended consequences here because you might find these foreign investors have even a bigger go because regular Australians are going to find it tougher to get through the hoops to be able to borrow money to buy an investment property, in most cases their future nest egg" John Symond, the founder and chairman of Aussie Home Loans said.

"I lot of these people are bringing money from China," he told Ross Greenwood on the 2GB Money News program last night.

"Without picking on the Chinese, they have had a huge spike on new housing something like $12 billion in last 12 months - now this doesn't come under APRA as a lot bring money from China.

"They are certainly help driving the pricing up and driving the shortage of properties available for first home buyers and people looking to buy their home in Australia.

"It is not just the Chinese there are other foreign investors who love Australia," he said.

The latest lending data suggests lenders are generally meeting the 10 per cent growth restraint sought by APRA, though some still to sufficiently rein in the pace of investor loans.

It has been suggested more than 82 per cent of investor lending remains within APRA’s macro prudential growth target (not materially above 10 per cent).

While a number of lenders are comfortably below this range (around 12 per cent of market share) and have scope to increase their exposure to housing investors, some lenders are tracking well above APRA’s macro prudential target growth range.

The 10 per cent benchmark is not a hard limit, but is a key risk indicator for supervisors in the current environment.

The benchmark has been established after advice from members of the Council of Financial Regulators, taking into account a range of factors including income growth and recent market trends.

ADIs with greater than $1 billion of residential term loans held 98.4% of all residential term loans as at 31 March 2015. These ADIs reported 5.3 million loans totalling $1.28 trillion.

Of these loans: the average loan size was approximately $243,000, compared to $235,000 as at 31 March 2014; $479.1 billion (37.4 per cent) were interest-only loans; and $30.1 billion (2.3 per cent) were low-documentation loans.

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