Australia

We’ve added new housing market metrics sourced from PropTrack. Users can now access home price indices as well as other insights for the main Australian cities, including sales volume, asking rent, and days on the market. 

In the chart below, we examined how home prices for the main East Coast cities are performing versus the rest of the country.  While all areas in Australia are seeing slowing price growth, Melbourne and Sydney are in the lowest percentile, with prices in fact dropping year-on-year.

Switzerland

For Switzerland, we’ve added a granular dataset from the central bank on new loan agreements. Users can see the volume of new loans, as well as the average interest rates for investment loans and variable- and fixed-rate mortgages. The dataset is also broken down by loan maturity. 

In the first chart below, we display the current curve of average fixed mortgage interest rates per maturity and compare it with six months ago. Fixed rates have increased across all maturities in a very short timeframe. 

In the second chart, we graph applications for mortgages with a term of 10 to 15 years alongside the average interest rate (displayed with an inverted axis). Unsurprisingly, there is a strong negative correlation: as rates increase, applications decrease. The current sharp pace of rate increases is triggering a commensurate drop in applications. This is not reflected yet in real estate prices -- displayed in the second pane – but a decline seems likely to follow. 

Ghana

We’ve expanded our data coverage with information about who owns the nation’s public debt, sourced from the Central Securities Depository of Ghana. 

The chart below displays the ownership breakdown between domestic and foreign investors. Public debt has doubled since 2019, but foreign investors’ proportion has declined. It’s at an all-time low of about 10 percent, compared with 30 percent three years ago.