Sydney is the world's second hard-to-load, second only to Hong Kong

Sydney`s house prices are the second most affordable in the world, according to the Demographia Global Housing affordability Survey. (Web Photo)

According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the U. S. think tank, Demographics, released the 2017 Sydney is the second most difficult city for global housing prices, Second only to Hong Kong, the top of the eighth consecutive year.

This is the 14th annual survey by the Demographics agency, which compares the median value of house prices with the median pre-tax income for 406 big cities in the world.

Global housing affordability ranking of major cities in 2017 (population more than 500000). (data source: Demographia)

According to the survey data, Hong Kong`s home price is the most difficult to bear, and the median price of the house is 19.2 times the median of the family (pre-tax) income, which is 18.1 times higher than the previous year. Sydney, Vancouver, the second, third, and median household income ratios were 12.9 and 12.6, respectively.

Among the top 10 cities with unaffordable global housing prices are San Jose (San Jose), Melbourne, Los Angeles, Honolulu (Honolulu), San Francisco, Oakland and London.

In Australia, with the exception of Sydney and Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth ranked 16,18,21, respectively, at about six times household income.

The vast and deep in the north of China has not entered the first ten.

Global housing affordability cities ranking 2017. (data source: Demographia)

But Laurie (Tim Lawless), head of research at CoreLogic, a property research firm, disagrees with the Demographia`s findings, arguing that house prices in Australia are not that high.

Sydney`s home price is nine times household income, he said, and Melbourne`s house price to household income ratio is 7.5. The figures for other Australian capital cities are also slightly lower than the results of the Demographia survey.

Lawrence said the biggest reason for the discrepancy between the two agencies was that Demographia used the price of a stand-alone house, while CoreLogic used the price of a home. In other words, CoreLogic compares household income to the price of apartments and homes, while the think tank compares income to housing prices only.

However, he also said: "regardless of the differences in the data, housing affordability in Australia is extremely poor, especially in Sydney."