Housing credit growth is stuck in the "mid single-digit range" for the long term, an industry analyst said yesterday.JP Morgan banking analyst Scott Manning said factors influencing this trend included falling house prices, low growth in housing starts and rising utility costs, and this was on top of the well-established household deleveraging trend.Manning, who was presenting the latest JP Morgan and Fujitsu Australian Mortgage Industry Report, said it would take some years before households returned to the gearing levels that prevailed before the debt boom of the mid-1990s, if at all.The fall in house prices is having two dampening effects on credit demand: there is less incentive to refinance and release equity from a property when valuations are flat; and investors are not making enough of a capital gain to cover property finance costs.The average duration of a home loan has increased from just 27 months at the peak of the cycle in 2004 to 44 months today.Fujitsu's Australia and New Zealand executive director, Martin North, said increases in a number of household expense items were running ahead of income growth. These include electricity, water, gas, rates and rent.Manning said another factor was that people were responding to the fact they were getting a better return on their deposits. He said the relative attractiveness of savings, compared with debt, would continue for some years as banks adjusted their balance sheets to meet Basel III requirements.