Michael has been once again voted Australia’s leading property investment advisor by the readers of ‘Your Investment Property Magazine’, but he’s not a theorist… He has been successfully investing in property since 1971 and is a leading property commentator and Australia’s most widely read property investment blogger. Join over 115,000 others who get their updates from Michael and his group of expert guest bloggers and benefit from their perspective.
You learn some lessons about money from books. Others you only learn the hard way – through experience, mistakes, and time. Looking back over several decades of investing and wealth creation, there are quite a few things I wish someone had explained to me earlier in life. Not because the information wasn’t available. I read…
Something happened over the last week that I’ve genuinely never seen in my five decades of property investing – the Federal Government reached into the pockets of every property investor in Australia and changed the rules of the game overnight. Negative gearing for new purchases, gone. The 50% capital gains tax discount, gone. Two of…
![Melbourne housing market update [video] | May 2026](https://cdn.propertyupdate.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/melbourne-1-270x200.jpg)
The Melbourne property market continues to face persistent downward pressure, with the latest Cotality data showing a dwelling value dip of 0.6% in April. This extended downturn represents the fifth consecutive monthly decline for the Victorian capital, pulling overall values down a cumulative 1.9% from the November cyclical high and leaving them 2.3% below the…
![[PODCAST] Federal Budget Tax Bombshells? What Property Investors Need to Know with Ken Raiss](https://cdn.propertyupdate.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/783-Federal_Budget_Tax_Bombshells-KR-Youtube-cover-270x200.jpg)
Australia has always promised that if you worked hard, took responsibility, invested wisely and built something for your family, you’d be encouraged – or at least not punished for doing so. But some of the recent Budget changes raise a very uncomfortable question: are we slowly dismantling that promise? Because buried behind the headlines, the…
For years, young Australians have been told to work hard, save harder, sacrifice more and somehow find a way into a housing market that keeps moving faster than their wages. And many of them have done exactly that. They have stayed at home longer with their parents, taken second jobs, delayed having children, invested in…
Every few years property investors are told the game is over. A new tax. A new regulation. A new lending rule. A new reason to sit on the sidelines. And yet, after 50 years of investing through booms, busts, recessions, credit squeezes, banking reforms, political interference, rising interest rates, falling interest rates, a global financial…
The national housing market is navigating a distinct cyclical turning point, with Cotality’s National Home Value Index rising by just 0.3% in April, taking the slowest monthly growth recorded since January 2025. While values continue to trend higher on a national level, the pace of appreciation is clearly losing momentum as the housing cycle moves…
For many Australians, most of their retirement wealth is tied up in their home. A simple, well-designed program to tap into those trillions in home equity could help boost their retirement incomes. Such a program exists. However, it remains little known and underused. The federal government’s Home Equity Access Scheme (HEAS) allows older Australians to…
The federal budget dropped last week and, if you believe the loudest voices in the room, property investment in Australia is finished. I don’t buy that for a second, but I do think this changes the game enough that investors need to think more carefully than they have for years. I’ve been watching governments tinker…
You’ve probably heard the word gentrification thrown around – usually with a bit of controversy attached. But if you’re a property investor, it’s not just a social trend… it’s a wealth accelerator hiding in plain sight. Because when a suburb starts changing – the cafes arrive, the streetscape improves, the demographics shift – property values…
