A report from News.com.au in Australia. "We’ve all seen the worrying headlines — house prices are falling, with tens of thousands of dollars wiped off the values of homes across the country. In fact, we’ve been in panic mode for much of 2018 as Sydney and Melbourne’s housing industry in particular took hit after hit. Last month, Deloitte Access Economics partner Chris Richardson told news.com.au house prices were falling 'by about $1000 a week in both Sydney and Melbourne.'"

"Meanwhile, CoreLogic figures from late last month also revealed the median house price in Sydney had fallen by $72,041 in a year, and $45,376 in Melbourne. Those figures seem pretty scary on paper."

"But isn’t this what we actually wanted to happen all along? Not too long ago, the focus was on the struggling first homebuyers being priced out of the market by cashed-up, greedy investors in our biggest cities and demands for action on housing affordability."

"House prices are causing a lot of people sleepless nights. The pace of price falls just won’t stop accelerating. Where will the impact hit? One of the first to fall could be property spruikers who use complex financial arrangements to help people get into houses."

"One property spruiker was recently taken down, not by insolvency but by the consumer watchdog. The company, which made most of its money from running seminars, promised people they could buy a house for $1. Australian Competition and Consumer Commission whacked the company and its director Rick Otton with an $18 million fine."

"'We Buy Houses and Mr Otton peddled false hope to people simply looking to get a foothold in the housing market or invest money in real estate for their future,' ACCC chair Rod Sims said."

"Then there’s Nathan Birch, a property investor and investment scheme operator, whose website claims he owns more than 200 properties and that he makes more than $500,000 in 'passive income' a year. If these claims are true, we could do the maths and see that each property is making a passive income of about $2500 a year. Less than I would have expected, given that holding property is neither riskless nor effort-free."

"Birch uses the hard-sell to make people who aren’t investing in property feel like they are missing out. 'What if I told you that we are living in a system, designed to benefit just a few — at the expense of ordinary people … The fact is we are living in the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme. It’s a system that rips power away from many individuals … and transfers it to a handful of shadowy elites,' he says."

"Apparently, he drives a Bentley with the number plate CSHFLO, and Birch says a report appearing in The Australian Financial Review earlier this year claiming he was being sued for missing his mortgage payments was not true."

"In a property downturn, we can expect more stories like that of Kate Moloney. Kate was dubbed property investor of the year 2012 by Your Investment Property Magazine, but she was deep in the red by 2016. She owned 16 properties in mining towns and said 'if we were to sell our properties, we would still owe the banks about $3 million dollars (not including arrears interest and selling costs)'."

"I expect journalists will have a field day tracking down all those young people who appeared in the press in 'inspirational' (or at least aspirational) stories about owning a vast property portfolio by age 22. Finding out how they are going with prices down 20 per cent will be very interesting."

"Real estate agents can’t be finding it easy either. The number of houses trading hands in Australia is at record lows, that means the number of commissions trading hands. (Oh, how my heart bleeds for all those twenty-something real estate agents who won’t be able to keep up the lease payments on their Mercedes!)"

The Daily Telegraph. "Nearly a third of Sydney’s newly completed units are now worth less than what their buyers will have to pay for them. Many of the homes were purchased at inflated prices agreed during the housing boom two years ago but dropped in value as the market slumped over the time it took to build them."

"To add to the pain, buyers now face an uphill battle to pay the full purchase price since lending policies are preventing banks from issuing mortgages that exceeded the market value of homes."

"Without a large enough mortgage to cover the full contract price, the buyers would have to cover the shortfall with additional savings or be forced to surrender 5-10 per cent deposits already paid to developers."

"And the trend could get worse. Cordell-CoreLogic figures show the supply of new apartments is set to increase by up to 144.4 per cent over the next two years in the city’s construction hot spots. CoreLogic head of research Tim Lawless said many pockets of Sydney were already oversupplied. 'It would be tempting for many these buyers to walk away but they usually can’t,' Mr Lawless said."

"Bannermans Lawyers principal David Bannerman said the worst affected buyers would be investors who bought off-the-plan with intentions of selling them for a profit before settlement but failed to attract a buyer. 'They may never have considered how they’d finance these properties because they always intended to flick them on,' he said. 'Now they have to find that money somewhere else.'"

"Apartment buyer Tom Christensen, 31, said buying a Surry Hills unit off-the-plan has left him 'scarred.' He and his partner bought the property four years ago for $1.65 million and despite being contracted to be completed in 2015 it was only finished this year."

"'If we’d settled when it was supposed to be built the value would have been much higher but now it’s dropped,' Mr Christensen said."

"They also discovered the developer had been living in their penthouse and damaged some of the interior, leaving scuff marks on the carpet and hammering more than 40 hooks into the walls. 'We should have got the apartment in December 2015, but because it took four years we lost out all the capital gains we could have got when the market was rising. Now it’s built, but the (market) has changed,' he said."