24713 – Lending Standards

Lending Standards measures the proportion of new housing lending written at high debt-to-income multiples — the share of loans where the amount borrowed is large relative to the borrower’s income.

The node is a component of Financing & Volatility Conditions (24710), which in turn sits within the APN Investment Conditions Index™ (24700). It is a national time series, not a geographic one — there is no locality distribution or map at this node.

It is reported separately from Cost of Capital (24711) and Credit Flow (24712) because the price of credit, the volume of credit and the composition of credit are three distinct properties, and a lending market can move in one without moving in the others.

This node has a single input, drawn from the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority’s Quarterly Property Exposures collection. The node reading and the input reading are therefore the same figure, and any revision to the source passes through in full.

The June 2026 quarter is the most recent quarter for which the input is available.

The share of new housing lending written at high debt-to-income multiples was 5.40% in the June 2026 quarter, against a comparison-window average of 12.50%. The standardised reading of −1.07 places the quarter a little more than one standard deviation below that average, at the 14th percentile of this node's record.

High debt-to-income lending has been the smaller share of the book for several years. The 2019–21 period sits at the upper end of this short record, and the share has contracted materially since.

Three of the six components of Financing & Volatility Conditions (24710) read below their own recorded averages in the current quarter, and this node records the largest of those distances. The index declares a direction of benefit for every component, and this one enters as it reads: a larger share of lending at high debt-to-income multiples indicates more accommodative credit conditions for prospective investment. The contraction recorded here therefore counts as a constraint on investment conditions rather than as a neutral observation, and it is the reason this node's signed and intensity readings coincide at 13.8.

• Signed direction. This component enters the index as it reads: a larger share of lending at high debt-to-income multiples indicates more accommodative credit conditions for prospective investment. The index publishes both frames — the signed reading, which carries that direction, and the intensity reading, which measures distance from the node's own record without regard to it. Neither is a quality assessment of Australian lending practice.
• Short comparison history — disclosure required. The input begins in the March quarter of 2019, giving twenty-eight quarterly observations inside the 2011–2025 comparison window used elsewhere on the platform, which is fewer than the standard requires and is flagged as such. The 30 quarters this node's position is ranked against are those twenty-eight plus the two quarters of 2026, which fall outside the comparison window; the two counts measure different things. The qualification is disclosed at this node, which consumes the measure, and at Financing & Volatility Conditions (24710), whose reading is built on it through this component.
• Single input. There is no averaging across sources to absorb a revision or a definitional change at the source, and no second measure of credit composition to corroborate the reading.
• Reporting lag. The regulator publishes this collection with a delay, so this node's most recent complete quarter will typically sit one quarter behind those drawing on Reserve Bank tables.
• Comparison basis. The position ranks this quarter against the 30 quarters in which the input is present. That full-coverage basis is the ratified one across the 24700 series; the all-rows basis is retired.

The other five components of Financing & Volatility Conditions (24710). Each is independently certified and enters that branch at equal weight.