Two of Australia’s largest lenders, which tightened home loans to some foreigners, yesterday said that they have uncovered mortgages backed by questionable overseas-income documentation.
Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) and Westpac Banking Corp have identified issues with some loans that rely on foreign income for approval, the two lenders said in separate e-mails.
The statement comes after the two lenders last month stopped new loans to offshore customers who are not Australian citizens or who do not hold appropriate residency visas. The banks also disallowed the use of foreign income for such customers to qualify for a loan.
The changes made by the biggest banks in the country are part of a broader scrutiny of foreign buying of Australian homes, which has helped drive a 55 percent jump in home prices across the nation’s capital cities in the past seven years. Rising demand, particularly from China, has triggered community concern that locals are being priced out of the property market, prompting the government to tighten scrutiny of foreign investment.
“Our delinquency rate on foreign-income loans is lower than the portfolio average, and a large proportion of these loans are ahead on repayments,” Westpac’s Sydney-based spokesman David Lording said in an e-mail. “Overseas borrowers are also well secured.”
Chinese appetite for Australian residential properties has continued to accelerate.
Buyers from the world’s most populous nation last year made 87 percent more purchasing inquiries in Australia with real estate agents and developers than in the previous year, according to new data from Juwai.com, a portal that lists real estate around the world for buyers from China.
More than half of them are seeking property in the A$200,000 to A$500,000 (US$147,000 to US$367,000) range, and the top motivation was education, according to the report released last month.
ANZ said the issue plagued only a “small number” of borrowers and the loans were performing better than average.
“All our analysis to date indicates the issue is relatively small and there is no material credit risk issue involved,” the lender’s Melbourne-based spokesman Stephen Ries said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained