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,…
When we talk about Australia’s housing crisis, the focus tends to fall on two things: supply versus demand. This post looks at one aspect of supply which is often (well frankly almost always) overlooked – spare bedrooms. Now the headlines cry “Build more homes,” and yes, in many cases, that’s the right answer. But what…
National rental vacancy rates have fallen off a cliff since Covid. They dropped from the “normal” 2% to 3% range in the late 2010s to barely 1% since 2021. That’s as tight as I’ve ever seen in the data – and as the charts show, there’s been no bounce back across most major urban areas…
The 2025 Australian Cooperative Election Survey (ACES) reveals a nation united in anxiety but divided in diagnosis. Nearly nine in ten Australians agree the country faces a housing crisis, yet opinions on the causes and solutions split sharply along ideological lines. Renters and younger voters see affordability and wages as the core problem; older and more…
Affordability is one of those slippery words that gets thrown around, but there are a few accepted ways analysts and policymakers measure it. They fall into three broad camps: price/rent to income ratios, repayment/rent burdens, and residual income tests. And whilst there are warts on all methods I like to use price or rent to household income…
