Housing and apartment specialist Devine Ltd expects the residential market to fire once interest rates start sliding.

Nervousness and uncertainty are the characteristics of the current residential market, but experienced investors are beginning to look beyond the broad headlines about price falls.

A 50 per cent increase in full-year distributable earnings has allowed the ING Real Estate Healthcare Fund to steer well clear of the listed property trust casualty list.

Property developer Stockland Group reported a fall in bottom-line annual profit and said it faced a tough market ahead.

The report highlights a large fall in home building activity that will see the shortage of housing stock blow out to 45,000 dwellings in 2008/09 alone.

Leighton Holdings has announced a $700 million capital raising to help fund its drive into the booming contract mining sector and help it capture billions of extra dollars of potential work it says is beyond its capacity.

First home buyer housing affordability barely improved in June, languishing at a 24 year low. The HIA-CBA First Home Buyer Affordability Index inched up by just 0.4 per cent during the June 2008 quarter to still be 6 per cent lower than a year earlier.

The owner of the failed Fincorp property investment empire yesterday admitted he had received as much as $7 million during the short life of the group, which collapsed last year costing its 8000 investors losses of $100 million between them.

Across Sydney Metropolitan Area, industrial average prime net face rents reached $135/sq m, in the 2007/08 financial year.

Metropolis research publication Connecting Cities: Networks demonstrates Sydney’s ranking in the world.