There seems to be ongoing confusion about the role housing is playing in Australian inflation and whether the recently expanded 5% Deposit Scheme has anything to do with the current CPI pulse and the February 2026 official interest rate lift. Let’s start with the facts. Housing carries roughly 21–23% of the CPI basket. Within that, rents account…
One of the more persistent questions I get asked at recent speaking gigs during the Q+A that follows by babble, is “When the RBA lifted rates 13 times across 2022 and 2023, why didn’t housing crash?.” The chart suggests it should have has more impact. Historically, rising cash rates slow dwelling prices. Sometimes sharply. Yet post-Covid,…
Some commentators are already calling the top of the property market. After all, interest rates are likely to rise again, geopolitical problems and wars may cause a recession, and Sydney and Melbourne finished the last couple of months prices flat to slightly down on the headline numbers – enough to feed the “downturn is coming”…
Property investment is certainly not rocket science and while you don’t have to be a genius to succeed in real estate, it never hurts to learn from great minds when trying to achieve great things. So let’s look at some quotes that have been attributed to Albert Einstein and see how we can turn these…
Towards the end of each year, many people start thinking about their financial position and what they want to improve in the year ahead. It is a natural time to step back and take stock. The problem is that most people focus on tactics – the next investment idea, a new budgeting app, a different…
I get this question all the time. Most property investment commentators will tell you that a vacancy rate under 2–3% is a sign of a strong rental market. That answer, however, is incomplete, and in some cases, dangerously misleading. Relying on vacancy rates alone has cost many investors significant money, particularly in inner-city apartment markets…
Rental shortages in Victoria and Western Australia are escalating, but while the Vic govt is using sticks to force investors and developers into providing more rental stock, the WA govt is using carrots to motivate and encourage them to do the same. Victoria and Western Australia have the fastest population growth rates of all States,…
If they’re armed with all the research available in today’s information age, why can’t economists agree on where our property markets are heading? In fact, a better question would be – why do so many get it wrong? The simple answer is those market movements are far from an exact science. The fundamentals are easy…
Every investor eventually faces this uncomfortable question: How do I know when it’s time to sell an underperforming investment property? It’s not an easy decision. In fact, it’s one of the hardest decisions property investors make because it challenges two powerful human forces – loss aversion and the sunk-cost fallacy. We hang on because we’re…
After the RBA’s first rate hike, the housing crash narrative has predictably resurfaced. Once again, we’re told prices are about to fall – quickly, deeply, and more or less uniformly across Australia. The logic is familiar: higher rates reduce borrowing power, therefore house prices must fall. It sounds neat. It sounds intuitive. And it’s mostly…
