Million Dollar Hotspots
Hotspotting
Household wealth in Australia keeps rising and the key reason for that is residential property – which accounts for 68 per cent of the total wealth of Australian households. New data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) shows that total household wealth has reached $16.5 trillion. Now, that number doesn’t mean much to the average observer, so here are some other numbers that give it some context. That household wealth figure represented a 1.5 per cent rise in the June quarter and the current level of the highest on record. It’s 9.3 per cent higher than a year ago, and it means...
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ANZ's Late Price Guess
Hotspotting
ANZ, the worst forecaster on property price outcomes in the nation, has just published its forecasts for what will happen with house prices in 2024. Yes, that’s right. They’ve published, in October, forecasts for house prices this year, a couple of months before the end of the year. Why have they done this? Because it’s the only chance ANZ has of getting it right with its property price forecasts. Essentially what it has done with these “predictions” is take the existing situation and extrapolate it two months into the future. So, you will be amazed to learn that they’re...
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Unit Surge Unstoppable
Hotspotting
The biggest paradigm-changing trend in Australian real estate, the rise and rise of apartments, is confirmed by the latest price data from the usual suspects – and is reflected in our choices for the latest edition of our most popular report, the National Top 10 Best Buys report. The latest price data from CoreLogic shows that unit prices are rising faster than house prices. While news media, in its predictable fashion, focussed on the perceived negatives in the CoreLogic Home Value Index published in October, my analysis of the figures is that they provide further evidence that rising...
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Mastering Property Management in Today's Market with Corinne Bohan of Image Property
Hotspotting
Join us for an insightful and essential webinar hosted by Terry Ryder, Founder of Hotspotting, and Corinne Bohan, Managing Director of Image Property, as they dive into the crucial role of professional property management in today’s rapidly changing rental landscape. In this engaging session, you'll discover: Building Your Winning Team: Learn why investors must focus on assembling a strong management team before growing their property portfolio and how a first-rate property manager can be a game-changer, especially in the face of evolving regulations. Navigating the Rental Market: Gain...
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Price Predictor Index Spring Edition: Units Thriving
Hotspotting
The new Spring edition of The Price Predictor Index provides emphatic confirmation of the most compelling trend in Australian real estate: the escalating demand for apartments and their challenge to houses on capital growth performance. We have been speaking about the rise and rise of apartments for the past 18 months and there is a growing body of evidence which confirms that more and more buyers are opting for attached dwellings: units, apartments and townhouses. Our analysis of sales activity data for the latest quarter for the Spring edition of The Price Predictor Index reveals that this...
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Canstar: The Dream Is Alive
Hotspotting
Affordability is the most-debated and the most confused issue in residential real estate. While the rental shortage and rising rents occupies the minds of many, the property issue that occupies the most space most often in news media and in the minds of Australian consumers is housing affordability. It has been this way for years, indeed for decades. And while the so-called Great Australian Dream is often declared dead, with young people doomed to a lifetime of renting, the evidence suggests otherwise. I recently finished working on a report with financial comparison website Canstar which...
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The Art of Buying Against the Grain with Arjun Paliwal of Investorkit
Hotspotting
In this episode of the Hotspotting Podcast, Tim Graham sits down with Arjun Paliwal, the Managing Director of Investorkit and a two-time REB Buyers Agency of the Year winner. Arjun shares insights on his unique approach to property investment, focusing on "buying against the grain." Here are some of the key topics discussed: Episode Highlights: Introduction to Arjun Paliwal: Arjun kicks off by talking about his journey in the property industry, how he scaled Investorkit, and the importance of innovation in finding investment hotspots. The Concept of 'Buying Against the Grain':...
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Listing Leap
Hotspotting
Australian real estate has been characterised by three different types of shortage which have put upward pressure on rents and prices. Those are the shortage of rental properties, the shortage of new dwellings under construction and the shortage of homes listed for sale. While the shortage of rental homes and the under-supply of new homes persists, there has been recent improvement in the number of homes listed for sale by vendors. SQM Research finds that the number of residential property listings nationwide rose by 8% in August, bringing the total to almost 250,000 properties, up from...
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Airbnb Furphy
Hotspotting
State governments across Australia have no meaningful policies for easing the chronic under-supply of rental properties – but they do have a talent for using the rental shortage as an excuse to raise extra revenue from the housing market. One of the primary tactics they use is to scapegoat a section of the community and blame them for the problem that they, the politicians, have created – and then hit the demonised group with new taxes and pretend that they’re doing it to deal with the rental shortage. The worst offender in this regard, although not the only one, is the State Government...
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CoreLogic Illogic
Hotspotting
CoreLogic is one of Australia's leading sources of data on residential real estate matters, although increasingly overshadowed by other, smarter data organisations like PropTrack. CoreLogic has lots of statistics about housing markets but when it comes to analysis and commentary, CoreLogic is very often a source of illogic. Their problem, like so many companies that comment on Australian housing markets, is that they employ economists to analyse real estate and the outcome very often is kindergarten analysis. Here’s a recent example: According to , property markets outside the capital...
info_outlineState governments across Australia have no meaningful policies for easing the chronic under-supply of rental properties – but they do have a talent for using the rental shortage as an excuse to raise extra revenue from the housing market.
One of the primary tactics they use is to scapegoat a section of the community and blame them for the problem that they, the politicians, have created – and then hit the demonised group with new taxes and pretend that they’re doing it to deal with the rental shortage.
The worst offender in this regard, although not the only one, is the State Government in Victoria.
Victoria, which has the highest property taxes in the nation, is by far the worst place in Australia to own an investment property – and the State Government there continues to work hard to confirm that reputation.
Its latest move is to blame the rental shortage on property owners who use short-term letting platforms like Airbnb, rather than have permanent tenants.
Choosing to use short-term letting is a perfectly reasonable and legal thing to do – and there is considerable public demand for houses and apartments made available for holiday letting, as an alternative to expensive hotel rooms.
But the Victoria Government has decided to demonise owners to use Airbnb and other similar platforms so that they can hit them with a major new tax and raise some desperately needed revenue for a government that is strapped for cash.
They’re claiming it will fix the rental shortage, but of course it won’t.
Airbnb didn’t cause the rental shortage in Victoria or elsewhere in Australia – it’s a very minor part of a much larger problem, and curtailing it won’t create higher vacancies and lower rents for permanent tenants.
This has been confirmed by a number of university studies, including one by the University of Queensland which found that banning short-term letting would not make any significant difference to the rental shortage.
And RMIT University in Melbourne has come up with a similar finding.
An RMIT University expert says the Victorian short stay rental reforms won’t solve the rental housing crisis.
Dr Liam Davies, an urban planning expert from RMIT’s Centre for Urban Research, says the new powers granted to Victorian councils and owners corporations to restrict or ban short stay rentals are UNLIKELY to have a significant impact on the state’s housing crisis.
Dr Davies said the reforms will likely have minimal effect on overall rental affordability.
He says: “This change to short stay accommodation is likely to have positive benefits at a local level but may not significantly impact the state’s rental affordability issues.”
Dr Davies cautioned against expecting widespread changes to the rental market as a result of these policies.
He said it’s unlikely that all those Airbnb dwellings would be shifted to long-term rentals – so the effect of the reform will probably be minimal.
The most likely response of property owners faced with these new restrictions will be to sell – as many investor owners of Victorian properties have already done recently – thereby making the property shortage worse.