As a result, whereas most other countries with housing booms have experienced a strong rise in arrears on housing loans once the boom ended, in Australia the arrears rate is today no higher than it was at the start of the boom in the mid 1990s. And, of course, it is low by international standards.
Graph 6  In the US, in contrast, a lot of the lending found its way to more marginal borrowers who previously could not afford a loan, or it took the form of aggressively structured mortgages which allowed people to borrow much more than they previously could. The home ownership rate in the US continued to rise during the first years of the boom.