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’ve heard every stereotype going around about property investors. Some commentators paint us as reckless speculators piling into debt we can’t handle, while others imagine a nation of mum-and-dad battlers gambling their super on a rental property they barely understand. The truth, according to the most comprehensive dataset the Reserve Bank has ever had access…
Australia desperately needs more homes, yet the latest building approval figures show how difficult it will be to deliver them. National dwelling approvals fell 2.7% in July, with approvals for detached houses dropping 4.2% and units declining 0.4%. At the same time, the cost of building a new home is rising again, placing further pressure…
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Melbourne has now recorded nine consecutive months of falling values — the longest unbroken decline of any Australian capital city in this cycle. August delivered a further 1.1% fall, leaving the market 6.5% below its November cyclical high and 6.8% below the March 2022 peak. Melbourne is not correcting from a recent high — it…
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Most property investors don’t fail because they lack access to information. In fact, today they have more information, more data, more forecasts, more podcasts, more software, more AI tools, and more opinions than ever before. And that may be part of the problem. Because when your brain is wired for survival, uncertainty can feel like…
The Australian government is attempting to overcome a serious housing shortage by constructing 1.2 million new homes over five years. To be frank, the government won’t be building any houses, yet the industry responsible for building them is losing companies at an alarming rate. The problem is particularly severe in New South Wales, where a…
Before we get into this week’s numbers, it’s worth stepping back and looking at where we sit in the cycle. The Reserve Bank held the cash rate at 4.35% at its August meeting, and it won’t sit down again until the 29th of September. Underlying inflation is still running above the RBA’s target band, and…
Labor has retreated from one of the most contentious parts of its 2026 federal budget tax package, although Australians who use discretionary trusts shouldn’t mistake the change for a return to business as usual. The original proposal in the Federal Budget would have imposed a 30 per cent minimum tax on the taxable income of…
Australia’s housing downturn has reached the point where the exceptions have run out. Cotality’s House Price Index fell a further 0.9% in August 2026 — the fifth consecutive month of decline — leaving national home values 3.6% below the March peak. But the number that defines this month is not the headline figure. It is…
There is no doubt that our housing markets are facing challenges from all directions, but clearly they have remained more resilient than the property pessimists had predicted. To better understand what’s happening, this monthly collection of charts from Cotality paints an interesting picture. According to Cotality, Australia’s most expensive homes are leading the housing downturn, with upper-quartile…
Australian property prices are falling, economists are revising their forecasts, and buyers are understandably wondering how much further the market could decline. Yet even a reasonably significant fall in property values would do surprisingly little to solve Australia’s housing affordability problem. That was the clear message delivered to the Senate Select Committee on Intergenerational Housing…
