Mortgage fintech founder warns of housing pain
Furthermore, only 1.9 percent of its loans have a debt-to-income ratio of six times, while Baum estimates these highly leveraged mortgages have accounted for a quarter of the major banks’ new mortgages in recent years. As interest rates rose sharply, it was these newer borrowers that Baum was most concerned about. “We’re going to see potentially disastrous outcomes on a human level on a scale I think most Australians have forgotten about, because we haven’t had a recession for 30 years,” he said from Tic:Toc’s headquarters in Adelaide. “We should have been more responsible five years ago. Because guess what? We will get a 10 percent increase, not a 25 percent increase in house prices. And the downside that we are now navigating will be much more manageable.” Baum said years of gradual easing of lending rules had allowed household debt to build up, giving policymakers and central banks limited flexibility as they tried to steer the economy through a world of higher inflation and slow