CANBERRA, Jan. 23 (Xinhua) -- Australia's housing market has been labelled as "severely unaffordable" by an international survey.
The 14th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, released on Tuesday, ranked both Sydney and Melbourne in the top five least affordable major housing markets in the world.
Sydney was ranked second least affordable, behind only Hong Kong, followed by Melbourne in fifth, Adelaide in 16th, Brisbane in 18th and Perth in 21st.
Housing markets were ranked on their housing price to income ratio, which calculates how much higher the median house price is than the median household income.
Property prices in Sydney were 12.9 times higher than median income, the survey found, while in Melbourne house prices were almost 10 times higher than household income.
Australia was ranked as the third least affordable region behind China's Hong Kong and New Zealand.
Wendell Cox and Hugh Pavlevitch, the authors of the report, said Australia's poor affordability was due to the nation's urban containment policies.
"Virtually all the severely unaffordable major housing markets ... have restrictive land use regulation, usually urban-containment policy," they wrote.
"Australia's generally unfavourable housing affordability is in significant contrast to the broad affordability that existed before implementation of urban containment.
"All of Australia's major markets have urban-containment policy and all have severely unaffordable housing."
However, competing firm CoreLogic found that the median house price in Sydney was nine times higher than median income and 7.5 times higher in Melbourne.
"Regardless of the difference in readings, affordability is pretty tough in Australia, particularly Sydney," CoreLogic research director Tim Lawless said.
"The big difference in results is because Demographia uses 'house' price figures, while CoreLogic uses 'dwelling' prices."
