The expanded 5% Deposit Scheme has had a big first year. Since the changes introduced on 1 October 2025, the government reports 102,594 Australians supported. Income caps were removed, property price limits lifted and the number of places uncapped. For someone trying to save a deposit while paying rent, that is a sizeable leg-up. My…
Earlier this month I had the pleasure of speaking at the Brisbane branch of the Urban Land Institute (ULI) Australia. The organisers asked me a dozen or so questions covering everything from affordability and population growth through to construction costs, infrastructure and the Olympics. Looking back on the discussion, four themes seemed to emerge. 1….
What if interest rates don’t fall? I keep seeing charts like the ones below. They all tell much the same story. Rates rise some more, inflation eventually behaves itself and sometime around late 2027 or early fiscal 2028 the cost of money starts heading south again. Maybe. But for mine, there is a growing risk…
The 2026 Intergenerational Report (IGR) is presented as a 40-year outlook, but reads like a defence of current policy. Housing – the major source of generational insecurity – barely appears. “Housing supply” occurs five times in 352 pages – see AI is of some use – while the report claims recent tax changes will create…
There is an old newsroom saying: if it bleeds, it leads. And of late, housing increasingly seems to qualify. The Weekend Australian has weighed into the Gold Coast housing market, reporting prices as “falling at a rate of knots” and discussing the prospect of substantially lower values. The underlying evidence includes asking-price data showing Gold…
The reaction to the May Federal Budget changes to negative gearing has been predictable. Many commentators are arguing that investors will now flood into off-the-plan apartments because the tax incentives increasingly favour new homes over established dwellings. Maybe. But I think many are looking at the wrong end of the telescope. The fundamental question isn’t…
I was recently asked by the Queensland Government to outline how the state might deliver one million additional homes by 2044. The initial request was for a digital roundtable. Instead, I chose to put pen to paper. mine writing always crystallises what I want to communicate. So rather than offer off-the-cuff remarks, I’ve set out…
For what seems like yonks, I’ve argued that Australia’s housing crisis isn’t really a housing problem. It’s a capital problem. Every government speech begins with the same objective: more housing, more affordable housing and more rental housing. Yet almost every major policy announcement seems to make investing in residential property a little less attractive than…
Australia isn’t seeing a US-style “boomer upsizing” surge, but the impact is similar. Older households are holding onto family homes longer, limiting resale supply. Combined with school catchment demand and “right-sizing” buyers, this creates a persistent squeeze in prime suburbs, keeping prices firm despite emerging broader market softness. In the USA In America, the story…
It’s not that people love or hate migration – it’s that most don’t understand what’s really driving our housing crunch. They’ve been told that “mass migration” is the villain, when in fact the problem is deeper: we’ve built a system that needs population growth to function, but refuses to make room for it properly. The snapback, not a surge Australia’s net…
