In Australia’s case the ratio of prices to income on a national basis has been apparently at a higher mean level – about 4 to 4½ – for about a decade now. The second support for the claim that dwelling prices are overvalued is the observation that they seem high in comparison with other countries.
In seeking to make such comparisons, though, there are serious methodological challenges. The key difficulty is in sourcing comparable data on the level of prices across countries. Such data are, at best, pretty sketchy. With that caveat very clearly in mind, consider the following two charts.