For decades, Australia’s housing debate has obsessed over the usual headline acts: soaring migration, slow approvals, rising costs, NIMBYism, and a construction sector that can’t catch a break. All true. All important. But beneath all that noise sits one of the quietest, most powerful forces reshaping housing demand – the surge in single-person households. Living…
I am often asked what it would take for housing values to fall across Australia in a meaningful and sustained way. My short answer is always the same. Australian dwelling values fall only when borrowing power contracts hard enough, and for long enough, to seriously undermine demand. At its core, this is not a story…
After the RBA’s first rate hike, the housing crash narrative has predictably resurfaced. Once again, we’re told prices are about to fall – quickly, deeply, and more or less uniformly across Australia. The logic is familiar: higher rates reduce borrowing power, therefore house prices must fall. It sounds neat. It sounds intuitive. And it’s mostly…
Analysis by BDO recently claimed that Australia’s build-to-rent (BTR) sector is now worth more than $30 billion. The report trumpeted 39,300 apartments “built, under construction or in planning” and celebrated the fact that nearly three-quarters of these projects are being bankrolled by offshore capital. The spin? That BTR is booming and set to make a…
Twice a year I update my Property Clock to cut through the noise and show where Australia’s housing markets sit – in my view – in the cycle. This latest update reinforces a key theme from my last post: despite rising interest rates, most markets – including all eight capital cities – remain in the recovery or upswing phase. Higher rates…
Australia’s housing debate has a habit of circling the wrong problems. Every quarter, the ABS hands us another set of numbers showing where the market is actually heading – and every quarter, policymakers nod politely, shuffle some papers, and carry on as if the laws of arithmetic don’t apply to them. The latest housing finance…
Every time the Olympic torch gets passed to a new city, the property cheerleaders wheel out the same playbook: values will soar, suburbs near venues will boom, investors will make a fortune. It’s an easy story to sell because it mixes infrastructure spending, global attention, and a convenient deadline. But history tells us that the story…
Every few years several commentators announced that regional Australia has finally solved its “young people problem”. Such babble was based on one cheery number: that the regions gained tens of thousands of 25-to-40-year-olds in the five years to the 2021 Census. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: that figure is more illusion than renaissance. To recap…
Depending on who you believe, Australian dwelling values rose by just under 9 % last year. That made 2025 the strongest annual result since 2021, helped along by modest interest rate cuts and the Federal Government’s expanded first home buyer schemes in the second half of the year. As always, the averages hid a wide…
The Australian Financial Review ran a piece by Lucy Dean that should make anyone interested in housing policy pause for thought. According to data released by Housing Minister Clare O’Neil, 5,778 people bought homes in October using the federal government’s expanded 5% deposit scheme -roughly one in ten of all home sales that month. On paper,…
