Snapshot of 2012 valuations

2012 land valuations from the Valuer-General are released this Wednesday. Meanwhile the V-G has released his snapshot of this years valuation. Commentary on the far north highlights the areas which have suffered most damage:

The residential and rural homesite market within the area has experienced historically low levels of sales activity. Despite this, residential land values overall have reduced by one per cent. 

The exception to this trend is higher valued beachfront properties in the area extending from Port Douglas south to the Northern Beaches of Cairns and through to Brampton Beach where reductions in land values of 10 to 15 per cent have been common. Land values in the Gordonvale locality have also been reduced due to the high number of distressed vendor sales influencing the market. Residential land values within Port Douglas have generally stabilised following the declines of previous years. 

Distressed sales are also prevalent in the commercial and multi-unit market sectors. The industrial market has softened, driven by decreasing financial returns. Land values in all three sectors have been reduced within the Cairns region.

 The Cassowary Coast was the local area with  the largest fall in Queensland at at 13.7%.

State finances & labour market flexibility

Henry Ergas has a column in today's Australian on Queensland's finances. That is paywalled but Henry's blog with notes on the column isn't. There are some interesting comments and links, however what caught my attention as something different were his comments on Queenslands  regional  labour market.

Labour market performance: As I note in the column, Queensland’s labour market seems less flexible than that in other states, with larger, more persistent variations in unemployment rates between regions. Here is the cross-sectional variance of unemployment rates for each State and Territory, unadjusted for labour force size, for December 2010 to December 2011, using data sourced from http://www.deewr.gov.au/lmip/default.aspx?LMIP/SALM.

I'm not on top of the data or stats to be able to comment here but perhaps something deserving of further research. The data from DEEWR is quarterly unemployment with a break down into smaller sub-regional areas.  Queensland Economy Watch has recently commented on the volatility of our monthly data so i'm not sure on reliability of sub-regional  data, albeit quarterly, or what has been used here? The timeframe of the data series used here is also rather short.

Back in 2007 Ergas was posting at Statewatch, a website funded by the Menzies Centre at a time when the Howard Guvmint was faced with wall-to-wall state ALP guvmints. He now sometimes posts at the right wing libertarian Catallaxy blog where the war on keynesianism is in full swing. Times change, eh!