For those excited by the prospect of snagging a home for half price following predictions of a home loan crisis and a plunge in property values, don’t get your hopes up.

A US-based researcher’s predictions that we will witness up to 50 per cent price drops across Australia are “outrageous” and “not going to happen”, according to leading economists.

In a 60 Minutes episode on Sunday, Jonathan Tepper, founder of macroeconomic research group Variant Perception, predicted a property market crash of 30 per cent to 50 per cent.

Mr Tepper expects property prices to plummet at similar rates seen in the US, Ireland and Spain as a result of huge mortgages on “overvalued” property in Australia.

AMP Capital chief economist Shane Oliver said it’s nothing new to find people making claims of upcoming property prices crashes, but “unless we have a very severe recession or interest rates go sky high causing people to default, it’s not going to happen,” he said.

“They often make the claim that [Australia has] the highest household debt to income ratio, but if the figure is adjusted for the amount kept in offset accounts and for businesses … it’s at the same level as it was in 2007/2008,” he said.

“As we can see at the moment, the banks are telling us households aren’t having problems servicing their debt.”

While he said “everything is possible” and there is the chance fraudulent pay slips have been used by some brokers, the banking regulator APRA is serious on banking standards.

“If we had unemployment at much higher levels than 6 per cent, if we had mortgage rates at more than 10 per cent I would be much more worried,” Dr Oliver said.

“But I’ve seen all these claims before and there is an underlying resilience in the Australian housing market that sees it hold up,” he said.

Here I am with @John_Hempton at a property auction in Sydney. Too much fun in one day. https://t.co/w0zmkh2YDF — Jonathan Tepper (@jtepper2)

February 21, 2016 Domain Group senior economist Andrew Wilson called the claims of a 50 per cent price drops in Australia’s capital cities “outrageous”.

“The clear characteristics of Australia’s capital city housing markets are orderly growth and correction phases, if anything we’re going to have a less volatile market in the future,” Dr Wilson said.

“Even in the deepest of recessions we haven’t seen [house prices drop 50 per cent], even in the 1990s with unemployment pushing over 10 per cent in some areas and high mortgage defaults, we saw a very modest change in house prices.”

Among all Australians, it’s typically under 5 per cent who are “highly leveraged” for their homes, with 96 per cent either owning their own home outright or paying less than 30 per cent of their incomes on repayments, he said.

“The logic doesn’t support any prospect of the type of house price drops being forecast by the doomsayers.”

HSBC chief economist Paul Bloxham does not believe Australia has a housing bubble, saying high prices are “explained by the fundamentals of supply and demand”.

“Most of the loans are held by upper income earners and the housing debt is fairly well allocated,” Mr Bloxham said.

While the ramp up in investor activity seen in 2015 was “concerning for the Sydney and Melbourne markets” he said measures taken to restrain those risks appear to have been successful.

“In Ireland, the US and Spain house prices went up and credit was misallocated to households who couldn’t afford to service it, but there was also an oversupply of dwellings, which meant when the falls happened [it was exacerbated],” Bloxham said.

In most areas of Australia there is no oversupply of homes and, in the case of Sydney, it is “very undersupplied,” he said.

However, LF Economics’ Lindsay David agrees “100 per cent” with Mr Tepper’s view the national housing market is “a bubble just waiting to burst” with a mortgage crisis on the cards.

“By global standards our banks are lending what could only be described as toxic sums of debt to homebuyers that will never be repaid,” Mr David said.

“One only needs to walk into a bank or mortgage broker and have a five minute chat to realise they will lend to you a sum of debt you could never ascertain in other countries with no core evidence that you could ever repay the debt, particularly interest only loans, in a market downturn,” he said.