Every major housing market in Australia is "extremely unaffordable," according to an annual international survey.
The median home in Sydney, for example, now costs 13 times the median annual household income, according to the 14th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey released Tuesday. The survey looked at 293 metropolitan housing markets in nine countries, comparing income to housing prices in the third quarter of 2017.
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The survey named Hong Kong and Sydney, Australia, the least affordable cities in the world.
In Hong Kong, the median home price is up to more than 19 times the median yearly income in the city. Last year, a home was 18 times more expensive than median income.
Hong Kong has topped the survey’s list for last eight years. It’s also the only Chinese city included in the survey, which also looks at major metro areas in Australia, Canada, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The study classifies markets as "extremely unaffordable" when the median home price is more than five times the median household income. Markets are deemed affordable when the median price is only three times median income or less.
Only 10 metro markets with populations over one million were found to be "affordable," and they were all small Rust Belt cities in the United States, including places like Rochester, New York, and Cincinnati, Ohio. However, many West Coast cities like San Francisco, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles were named "extremely unaffordable," with Santa Cruz ranking as the least affordable city in the U.S. and the fourth least affordable city in the world.
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Vancouver was the third least affordable market in the world and at great danger of a housing bubble, according to the survey, which also cited the UBS Global Real Estate Bubble Index as evidence of the growing fears over overheated Canadian markets.
London, Miami and New York were likewise found to be "extremely unaffordable."