People don’t get the connection here. There’s a reason why we can’t fix the housing shortage. People think it’s easy. We just need more houses so build more houses. Well, first, building a lot of houses isn’t easy at all. There’s land release and zoning and a whole bunch of things that need to happen […]
What is the property capacity gap?: the economy in pictures
See the world through the eyes of an economist: Property, borrowing capacity and rents. Corelogic released their market update for October last week, so let’s keep our focus on the property market this week. First up, prices were up a solid 0.9% in October, with both houses and units now performing strongly. That’s now the […]
T-Bomb: Fail fast, fail furious
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Mistakes are a cost of doing business. “Wow. You work so fast.” I was messing around with my messaging system while a friend was over the other day. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was trying to figure it out. Click that setting. Have a look. Youtube what that […]
How ‘walk to shops’ = $2.6m over reserve
It’s a lot of money to avoid teaching your kids to cook. Here’s a funny story from a recent sale reported in The AFR. A property for sale in Canley Heights Sydney sold at auction for $2.6m over reserve! That was over double the price they were expecting! You’d have to be happy with that […]
CBA puzzled by ‘extraordinary times’
Without this, would price falls have been bigger? CBA Economists are privately a bit confused about the housing market’s current strength. We got CoreLogic’s October update last week. It showed that the pace of gains remains strong, with prices up 0.9% in the month. But there’s a puzzle. This strength is ‘quite remarkable’. The turnaround […]
T-Bomb: Why only humans think growth looks like this
Truth Bomb Tuesday: Change is tiny kid’s cardigan. There’s a funny thing that happens when your kids are little. You accumulate your own favourite outfits for them. They’re almost certainly not the clothes that they want to wear all the time themselves. But they’re your favourites. That cute little cardigan. The one piece romper suit. […]
Energy prices soar while job ads tank: the economy in pictures
See the world through the eyes of an economist: energy prices, job ads, average household size, and real wages. Here are the charts that caught my eye this week. First up, inflation jumped up in the month, largely thanks to oil and energy prices, which as you can see, have spiked in recent times: Australia’s […]
T-Bomb: The ‘hour to midnight’ practice for getting unstuck
Truth Bomb Tuesday: If you only had an hour, you’d be surprised at what you could get done “You’ve got one hour. Go.” That’s the beginning of an exercise I do with my students sometimes. It’s called ‘an hour to midnight’. It’s not particularly complicated. Basically I just give them a task that would normally […]
Housing supply situation going from bad to worse
You can’t run two construction booms at once! When I look down the telescope at the next 5 to 10 years, I see an epic housing shortage coming. “Hang on, Dymphna. Aren’t we already in an epic housing shortage?” Yes. Yes we are. But it’s about to get epic-er. Current budget projections have the Australian […]
Official: Property has cleared the last hurdle
Well, looks like we were making a mountain of a mole hill There is really nothing holding the property market back now. One of the mysteries in recent years was how we managed to digest 400 basis points of rate hikes with barely a blip in the property price data. If I had told you […]