Sometimes we love change and sometimes we hate it. In fact, some of us love to change and others fear it. Why is change difficult for many of us? Because change makes us move out of our comfort zones. It takes courage to leave something familiar and try something new. One of the jobs of…
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…
Figures released today by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) show that over the year to December, wages grew by 3.4%. For households, however, the number that really matters is what happened to wages after inflation. Over the same period, the consumer price index (CPI) rose by 3.8%. This means real wages (wages after accounting…
Markets shift, technology evolves, governments adjust policy, yet the core drivers of property wealth don’t change. What does matter – human behaviour, scarcity, quality and patience – stays constant even when everything else seems uncertain. So today I’d like to discuss a few things that never change in a world that never stops changing, because…
If you listen to the public conversation about property, you’d think Australia’s housing market is a tug-of-war between Baby Boomers and Millennials. Boomers are blamed for owning everything. Millennials are portrayed as locked out and angry about it. But that framing misses the generation that has already done exceptionally well from property, and is now…
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…
If you’ve been watching Australia’s property markets lately, you’d be forgiven for thinking everything comes down to interest rates. Every headline tells the same story. Rates up. Rates down. Rate cuts coming. Rate cuts delayed. Apparently, that’s all that matters. But here’s the uncomfortable truth. Interest rates don’t decide where housing demand shows up. They…
Imagine being told that after a lifetime of working hard, paying taxes, saving diligently, and raising a family, you’ve somehow become part of Australia’s problem. That your success – owning a home, saving in superannuation, or simply living longer – is now evidence of “intergenerational unfairness.” That’s the message emerging from the Albanese government’s latest…
What if I told you that one of the most significant demographic shifts shaping our cities, our housing markets, and even our social lives over the next few decades… isn’t migration, isn’t birth rates, and isn’t ageing? It’s something far more personal. In today’s show, Simon Kuestenmacher and I are talking about a silent revolution…
Brace yourself. New modelling by PropTrack suggests that Australia is on the cusp of a property divide, with values in many suburbs poised to double by 2030 if recent trends continue, while other locations are likely to stagnate or decline. I know this sounds dramatic, but if the research highlighted in realestate.com.au is correct, this…
