NEW figures show housing prices are on the rise.
Australian Property Monitors said on Wednesday in its quarterly housing report that the median price of a house rose by 3.2 per cent over the year to March.
Over the same time, the price of a home unit was up by only 0.7 per cent. (The median is the value in the middle when prices are ranked from high to low.)
The slow rises can be seen in other measures, like the Australian Bureau of Statistics' established house price index, which grew by 2.1 per cent through 2012.
Over the same year, the bureau's consumer price index rose by 2.2 per cent.
So it's not a boom.
Far from it.
And the Reserve Bank of Australia wants to make sure it stays that way.
In a speech in Sydney on Tuesday, the Reserve Bank of Australia's head of financial stability, Luci Ellis, twice warned that the central bank did not want a return to the boom times seen a decade ago.
Her wish is being granted, at least so far.
But the decline starting in late 2010 and extending into early 2012 has ended.
The only questions are how steep, and how durable, the pickup will be.
Dr Ellis thinks the big shift to a low-inflation economy generated a one-off surge in housing prices, as lower interest rates enabled banks to make bigger loans.
"But the transition does end after a while, and it is our assessment that it has now ended," she said.
And that would mean slower growth in prices from here and, as a result, a greater likelihood that fluctuations around that trend would bring falls - rather than just slower growth - in prices, she said.
The recent behaviour of the ABS house price series bears that out.
The index, which in various incarnations goes back as far as 1986, had recorded only two annual falls in prices before the global crisis in 2008.
One was in 1992, but prices fell only 0.2 per cent despite the major recession and double-digit home loan interest rates.
The other was in 1996, but that drop was still only 0.9 per cent even though the RBA had nudged the standard home loan rate up from 8.75 per cent to 10.5 per cent.
More recently, annual falls have been recorded in 2008, 2009, 2011 and 2012.
Of course, for every rise or fall in housing prices there are winners and losers.
Homebuyers like the falls while home owners, including investors, like to see rises.
But this new environment could be seen as the worst of both worlds.
Homebuyers can look forward to persistently high housing prices, but investors will have to do without the prospect of the kind of recurrent booms seen over the past 30 years.
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