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This is just a way to better your household position. So reach out to Lee and the team at Hills Finance if you'd like to have a chat. Now on the finance side, Lee, How are trends looking right now from a national finance data? Because as we all know, finance leads the way to property. Yeah.
And as you mentioned before, it's delayed data. So this is all data lending indicators as of March 2023. So the value of new loan commitments for total housing has rose to 4. 9% to $24 billion after a fall of 1% in February. And so while this was the first monthly rise since January 2022, it remained 26.
3% lower compared to one year ago. So that's total housing. For owner-occupied housing, this rose to 5. 5% or by 5. 5% to $16 billion.
And that was 24. 8% lower compared to a year ago. And then for investor housing, this rose 3. 7% to $8 billion. And that was 29.
2% lower compared to a year ago. Now on the lending front, Lee, those changes are interesting because there's two core things that people should really pick out from this March ending data. Number one is finance is actually rising now. And interest rates haven't come down yet. They're still way higher than they were this time last year.
And finance has bottomed and it's starting to rise based on these indicators. And it's rising both in investors who are obviously taking advantage of the tides that might be changing in many cities, especially as you can see some of our bigger markets that drive these numbers, they're changing. And owner-occupiers, first-time buyers have obviously played a key part and owner-occupiers now seeing that rise is definitely important. I think there's a bit of a sugar hit for those first-time buyers in New South Wales trying to get in pre-end of financial year. That's definitely something we've seen on that $1.
5 million balance and lower on that liberal policy. And so I think that as that phases out, we'll see a big run on that finance for what's possible in that New South Wales area. Now, the second and most important thing, this is called net finance or net trends. And this is something important to consider. Finance is, yes, nationally 26.
3% for total dollars lower than this time one year ago. We are now one year ago from that sort of interest rate increasing trend, which definitely means that we have seen firstly a borrowing capacity shift of about 38%, yet finance numbers are down 26%, which means there's a net improvement there because that difference is about 12%. So that means there's still actually more demand relative to the supply of credit. It's just that the fact is the supply of credit is tight and hence we're in that lower finance position, which means there's still a lot of heat in that market. It's just the fact that that heat in that market is actually A, rising now, but still in net terms better than the borrowing capacity shift.
Whereas if we saw a 38% borrowing capacity decline and finance trends would say down 40%, that would be not only a finance factor, but other weaker factors making an overall shift. So this means there are some green shoots in comparison to just that isolated finance side of the equation in housing that is pulling the markets back in terms of how much money is floating around in Australia. Now, on that note, we've actually been understanding these borrowing capacity trends and looking at research in a different way and trying to understand where that audience is looking at property prices in the sub 500K. We've released our latest research paper. So on the latest research paper at InvestorKit, it's Unlocking Queensland's Hidden Gems, which is the top four high growth regions under 500K.
So in the past, Lee, me and you've gone through a bit of a Q&A and I guess I'll hand over back to you to figure out, hey, what you'd like to know from me on our latest research paper. Yeah, so this was released in May, this one. So again, if you want to go to investikit. com. au forward slash white papers, you'll be able to see all the recent papers there.
Again, this one is called Unlocking Queensland's Hidden Gems, top four high growth regions under 500K. So Arjun, firstly, why did you pick 500K as the budget for the white paper that you based this off? And why are they hidden gems? Yeah, good question. So I think the 500K was selected for three reasons.
Number one is there has been a huge shift in median pricing. And when you look at median pricing, that middle becomes lower when a lot of people operate at lower price points. And that's what's happening in Australia. A lot of people are actually operating at lower price points, which in summary means prices are not declining as much as people think. There's been a shift in buyer appetite to actually buy cheaper properties, which drags median pricing down.
The second reason is the borrowing capacity declines are placing a huge focus on the affordable price points. 38% declines in borrowing capacities as an average is massive. And if you think about it, that sort of 600K to 800K pricing is now 350K to 550K for many people in that range. So that's something that's become popular. We're seeing it in our business as well.
The inquiries of that sort of 350K to 550K are far greater than they've ever been. Because of affordability. Definitely. And then the third part is naturally at lower price point, rental yields are better. And so people who are trying to find a balance of growth and rental yields want to try and figure out how I can minimize my cash flow losses because everything is a loss in this environment from a cash flow perspective.
And that's the kind of things that we're seeing. Now, as for hidden gems, well, look, there's two things there. That's me getting a little fancy with my writing or the team getting fancy with their writing. And the second thing mainly is that people often think when you're looking for affordability or looking for growth markets, it needs to be in major cities. And that is not the case at all.
Some of the biggest growing markets are some of our affordable cities at this present time. And that's been the case for last year. Now, obviously, our biggest cities are starting to go into recovery action, trying to make up those losses. And hence why those gains have come up a fair bit in recent months, led by the top end. But the hidden gems are more so giving acknowledgement to the markets that people perhaps don't traditionally consider.
So before we get to what these hidden gems are, what was the mythology used to pick these regions? Yeah, so the mythology used to pick these regions, right? We firstly looked at the short term price trends because obviously we don't want these areas to have exploded so massively that we have missed every single possible part of it. But look, some of them have, but that was a consideration. The second thing was long term trends and long term being 10 years.
All these markets in action here, the four in this report, have actually had long term compound growth rates of 5% per annum or more, which is in line with like national averages. And so since they're in line in that 30 year trend, our thinking should be, well, for things to return back to a trend, we also like to see underperformance in the last 10 years because they technically have more legs in them if they were to pick up based on changing environments. And that's the case for some of these areas. Then we obviously looked at the most important piece in this environment right now, which is affordability and serviceability. So we're not thinking affordability just because it's cheap.
That's not a fair way to look at it. We're looking at it in line with incomes, interest rates that are high, rent payments, all relative to each other. So it's actually making sense to what the local audience wants. Is it affordable for them? And naturally, then we go into the algorithm stuff, the machine learning, the AI, all the fun stuff, economic indicators, sales market indicators, rental indicators, and future supply.
They've been the same economic indicators and data points that we've used to make some pretty bold predictions over the last few years that have come up. For example, predicting that Adelaide would be the best performing capital city for 2022 and rise double digits on mainstream media, which was on the weekend to show. And both those things happened when we made that call early 2022. And even in the face of many interest rate increases, 10, 11, it still happened for that year. The same algorithms are used to predict Bendigo and Ballarat would be some of the top performers in the pre-COVID era and going into COVID.
And that also happened, as well as even going back to regional Tasmania and its boom well before COVID. Also, these are the same indicators used to predict that the declines in Sydney would sustain and continue for 2022. And that when we talked about Sydney's recovery and why six reasons it would recover the start of this year, even without interest rates having to fall, we predicted that using the same algorithms, which in fact, Sydney has been recovering at the start of this year. So I hope I can just share that these are with very high confidence were made and have proven themselves for five years running now that they are extremely accurate. And we've had some phenomenal results for ourselves, myself personally, and for clients.
Fantastic. And so again, what is the areas and why? Why now? Okay. Okay.
So the what are the areas? I'm going to be giving some away, but also for the rest of them, I encourage you to download this research report. It's totally free to download and you can get it from investikit. com. au.
And we have a free section there called research. And then you click on white papers. We've released over a year's worth of research papers. They're often featured on the AFR, Weekend Today, Sunrise, news. com.
