Despite all the challenges thrown at them, our housing market has kept rising for 15 months in a row now.

Not only have house prices risen strongly, but so have rents. And there seems to be no relief in sight for tenants.

The chronic housing shortage is being exacerbated by low building approval levels and immigration that remains at very high levels.

April is a holiday month with Easter, school holidays and Anzac Day interrupting our housing markets, and over the weekend, the preliminary auction clearance rate slipped a little on similar auction volumes week-on-week.

There were 1,952 auctions held last weekend, roughly on par with the week prior (1,985), but returning a lower preliminary clearance rate of 72.7%.

The volume of auctions held is well down from the pre-Easter period when the weekly volumes peaked at 3,519, but well above a year ago when 1,708 auctions were held.

 See Corelogic’s full auction report below.

However, there is still strong depth in our housing markets, considering this reasonably generally strong auction clearance results.

Easing inflation and the prospect of a rate cut in the next year are buoying vendor hopes and buyer appetites for property.

Recently Oxford Economics gave their home price forecast for the next three years, and as you can see from the table below, they are very bullish on how our housing markets are going to perform moving forward.