A report from ABC News on Australia. "One of the policies the Coalition took to the election was a scheme to lower the amount first home buyers need to save to buy a property. Prime Minister Scott Morrison said it would enable first home buyers to access the market with a deposit of only five per cent."

"'The reality is we can only help first home buyers if someone loses, which means prices probably have to fall,' said The Grattan Institute's Brendan Coates. 'The reality is quite a lot of those people will never get access to this scheme because they may struggle to ever be able to afford a loan based on bank regulations around how much you've got to be able to repay.'"

"The scheme is currently capped at 10,000 borrowers, approximately 10 per cent of the Australians who bought their first home last year, meaning not everyone eligible for the scheme will reap the benefits of it. 'It means the policy's … going to be fairly irrelevant, it's not going to do a lot to boost home ownership,' he said."

"JP Morgan chief economist Sally Auld said encouraging first home buyers to enter the market in a period of uncertainty could mean some of them might end up owing more than their property is worth — something known as negative equity."

"'In a market where at the moment house prices are still continuing to fall and the sort of one to two-year outlook is reasonably uncertain, I'm not sure that encouraging a cohort of buyers without an established credit history to take out loans at a high loan-to-value (LVR) is sort of hugely sensible. I mean, the point with this is that the money ultimately has to be paid back,' Ms Auld said."

From Nine News. "A record number of empty apartments, a growing shortage of buyers and tenants and record new supply has created an unprecedented phenomenon: ghost tower syndrome. There are currently 9446 apartments listed for sale in Sydney with more than 20 per cent - or almost 2000 of them - new."

"In addition to record numbers of apartment listings, Sydney is also experiencing a glut of rental units looking for a tenant, says My Housing Market chief economist Dr Andrew Wilson. The carnage is widespread from the city to Parramatta, Liverpool, Ryde, Chatswood and Bankstown."

"There are currently 16,201 units listed for rent in Sydney – up more than 50 per cent over the past year - reflecting unit vacancy rates rising sharply from 2.1 per cent to 3.3 per cent over the same period. Dr Wilson says buyers are still wary of the market and numbers are down 30 per cent compared to last year."

"With a decline in new tenants due to the recent surge in first home buyers, a sharp decline in migration and more new stock continuing to flood the market, it will be a lengthy process to absorb record unit listings, with many new apartment buildings likely to remain ghost towers, he says."

From News.com.au. "House prices in some 'non-aspirational' outer suburbs could fall by 85 per cent and there is 'no conceivable reason why some don’t go to $1,' according to a hedge fund boss. Bronte Capital founder John Hempton, who went undercover with investment expert Jonathan Tepper in 2016 to investigate poor lending standards, says it’s 'stupid' that a house in Rouse Hill where 'it’s grass to the Blue Mountains' could be worth $1.4 million."

"Speaking to The Jolly Swagmen podcast, the renowned short-seller said the 'fantasy was deeper' the further they went from the CBD, with Rouse Hill in the north west the 'centre of the Sydney property bubble.'"

"Mr Hempton recalled how he and Mr Tepper, posing as a gay graphic designer couple with 'low and variable' income, travelled around Sydney talking to lending officers, mortgage brokers, real estate agents and developers to see how much they could borrow."

"'It was pretty clear bad practice was ubiquitous and the further you went from the centre of Sydney the worse it got,' he said. 'In particular if you went north and west. Norwest Business Park, Kellyville, Rouse Hill, they were surreal, whereas if you went south and west they were just wacky.'"

"Bank underwriting standards limit borrowing to 6.8 times income, but the pair found the real number was more like 7.2 and in some cases up to 10. 'The expression they used, and we kept hearing it again and again and again, is, ‘I know a bloke who can get things done,’ Mr Hempton said."

"'If you wanted to borrow eight or nine times your income they would send you to someone else who knew all the loopholes and was playing fast and loose. The blokes who could ‘get things done’, there were tricks for doing it, mechanisms for faking. They would tell you where the eaknesses were in banks’ monitoring. The most extreme one was fake tax returns, literally software to develop them.'"

"Lending standards were 'bad everywhere' but 'the further we went away from the CBD the more insane the bank branch officers or brokers were,' he said. 'It wasn’t even a little bit worse, it was a lot worse. The fantasy was deeper. People construct fantasies around whatever the asset bubble is. I expected the bubble to be in the inner part where houses are expensive. I completely changed my mind. The bubble is in the outer part. It affects ordinary people. '"

"Mr Hempton said it was a 'joke' that the median house price in Mt Druitt was over $1 million while the median household income was about $55,000. 'You walk down a street with about seven or eight pawn shops in Blacktown and the houses just around the corner from the junkies and the pawn shops were $900,000,' he said."

"The question, he said, was 'who was buying' all the housing in Mt Druitt and adjoining Rooty Hill, 'neither of which is salubrious.' 'The answer was people who were eight suburbs back towards the city who were buying because they couldn’t afford a house where they wanted to live so they were just leveraging up rental properties in the hope they would get enough money to buy the house they actually wanted.'"

"'What astonishes me is nobody grows up desiring to live in Rooty Hill. You live in Rooty Hill because you can afford it and that’s what happens. It’s not an aspirational place. In non-aspirational places houses were trading at 17 or 18 times income, and lending officers were telling you to draw your credit card to the max,' Mr Hempton said."