Hotspotting
The greatest complaint heard most often in real estate across Australia is that there are plenty of buyers, but a shortage of listings. The number of properties for sale has been well short of the levels needed for a balanced market, particularly in the boom cities of Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth. But that is steadily changing. According to SQM Research, total listings of properties for sale nationwide grew 7.6% in November and are now more than 10% higher than a year ago. Perhaps most significantly, there were major rises in November in those three boom cities, with the...
info_outline Media AbsurditiesHotspotting
Things are constantly changing in real estate nationwide but the one factor that never changes is this: we can always rely on news media to distort the facts and deliver a steady flow of misinformation to Australian consumers, all in the interests of attracting readership, with little regard for accuracy, honesty or fairness. The past week or so has been chockful of media nonsense. If you can believe the headlines, the national property boom is over, house prices are plunging, the rental boom is over and the North Queensland city of Townsville is a mining town. One of the constants of my...
info_outline 2025 PredictionsHotspotting
Rumours of the death of ‘the national property boom’ are greatly exaggerated – especially since we didn’t have a national property boom in 2024. Rather, over the past 12 months, we have seen differing market cycles in many locations - as is the usual state of play in real estate throughout Australia. Strong property price growth was recorded in Perth, Adelaide, and Brisbane in 2024, but not in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, Darwin or Hobart. Similarly, in the regional areas, there were declining and stagnating markets, as well as some where prices were showing good price...
info_outline Regional Investment BoomHotspotting
Victoria’s real estate market is witnessing a significant shift as young first-home buyers increasingly seek affordable housing in regional areas. According to recent data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), first-home buyer loans in Victoria soared to 4,202 in July – the highest number in nearly two years. This surge reflects growing confidence among young buyers and a trend towards exploring housing options beyond Melbourne. Nationally, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and the Regional Australia Institute report that the flow of people from cities...
info_outline Units Beat HousesHotspotting
Hotspotting was among the first to identify and highlight the most significant change in the Australian real estate scene – the emerging trend which we document in the quarterly editions of the report titled The Rise and Rise of Apartments., published in association with Nuestar. This trend has turned upside down the dominant paradigm in real estate, that houses out-perform apartments on capital growth. There is now growing evidence that attached dwellings are mounting a strong challenge to houses. It has long been believed that land content was the big thing in driving...
info_outline Why a Buyer’s Agent Is a Game-Changer for Property Investors | Featuring Chris GrahamHotspotting
Thinking of buying property on your own? 🏡 In this episode of The Property Playbook, host Terry Ryder is joined by Chris Graham, Senior Property Advisor at Australian Hotspot Advocacy, to explore why engaging a buyer’s agent could be the key to securing your next winning investment. What You'll Learn: What a buyer’s agent does and how they work exclusively for the buyer’s interests. The value of off-market properties and how buyer’s agents can provide access. Why having a professional on your team ensures due diligence and avoids costly mistakes. How to identify a trustworthy...
info_outline Melbourne Market MythsHotspotting
Melbourne’s property market remains the great under-achiever of the nation but that may be about to change. A number of key indicators suggest better performance by the Melbourne property market is imminent. One pointer to better times is the latest Property Sentiment survey by API magazine, which recorded a major turnaround in investor attitudes towards the Victorian property market. The survey asked: Which state or territory do you regard as having the best property investment prospects for the next 12 months? Mid-year Melbourne and Victoria attracted only 8.6...
info_outline Interest Rates & PricesHotspotting
I have frequently highlighted the poor track record of economists in predicting outcomes in real estate markets across Australia – and in particular the embarrassingly bad record of economists working for the Big 4 banks and for other major institutions like AMP Capital. Their forecasts for house prices at the beginning of each of the past five years have been so far off the mark, it’s puzzling that the big-name economists who made these blunders have kept their jobs. Because what these outcomes mean is that these boffins have a very poor understanding of residential real...
info_outline The Property Playbook - Shifting perspective: the key players in Australia’s housing crisisHotspotting
The Property Playbook is a dynamic real estate show that empowers investors and professionals with the insights and strategies needed to achieve strong returns in the Australian property market. Hosted by Tim Graham & Terry Ryder from Hotspotting. In this episode, Tim Graham is joined by Ben Kingsley, Chair of the Property Investors Council of Australia. to discuss advocacy work for property investors amidst legislative changes and their impact on the housing market. Ben emphasises the need for balance in tenant rights and business returns and dissects the consequences of...
info_outline Smart Investing Achieve More Than 6% Yield Without Compromising GrowthHotspotting
Discover how to achieve the ultimate win-win in property investment: high rental yields and strong capital growth. In this replay of Hotspotting's exclusive webinar, Terry Ryder, founder of Hotspotting, and Tim Graham, General Manager, reveal key insights from their groundbreaking "Pulse Report." Key Topics Covered: The Affordability Advantage: How affordable properties can outperform prime markets. Debunking the myth that cheap real estate doesn’t grow. Top Performing Locations: A spotlight on suburbs and regional areas delivering over 6% rental yields and up to 29%...
info_outlineWhenever I’m asked for my rules for successful investing, I usually begin my response with this: Rule One – stop reading newspapers.
Expressed in a more 21st Century context, stop treating media soundbites as research.
People who base their investment decisions on the white noise in news media are running the risk of making very bad moves in the market.
My observation of the content of news media coverage of residential real estate is that there is far more misinformation than real, accurate, reliable information.
In modern media it’s all about clickbait and I find repeatedly that the headline presented to induce you to CLICK is highly misleading – and sometimes an outright lie.
I could provide dozens of examples from this week alone, but here’s just one classic example.
The headline above an article published on the news.com.au network, the nation’s biggest news organisation, proclaimed: “Worst is over: where rents are plummeting”
This was followed by the following opening statement:
“The worst of the rental crisis appears over across much of Australia, with rents plummeting in these areas. But it’s not all good news.”
Now the headline in this case is more than a lazy piece of sensationalism – because, not only is it untrue to claim that “rents are plummeting” but the content of the article does not support the claim in the headline.
You may have observed that, in the surreal world of journalists, nothing falls or decreases or drops – it collapses, it nosedives, it falls off a cliff – and, yes, it plummets.
Even when the decline is a few percent, barely a blip, it will be declared to be plummeting.
So having made the statement that rents were plummeting and that the worst of the rental shortage crisis was over, the New Limited article utterly failed to deliver on this very big statement.
If it was true, it would be one of the stories of the year. But, of course, it wasn’t true.
According to the article, Queensland’s asking rents “have surged again, increasing across 252 Queensland suburbs by up to 15 per cent since June”.
I’ve checked my dictionary definition of “plummeting” and it certainly doesn’t apply to the Queensland situation.
Next, Victoria. According to this article, there are more than 200 suburbs where rents are now at least $100 a week more expensive for units than in 2021.
It said: “Well-connected areas like Ashburton, Parkville, Aspendale, Caulfield South, Glen Waverley and Carlton have posted some of the biggest rises in weekly unit rents across the past three years, all of them up more than 40 per cent, according to new PropTrack data.”
No sign of anything plummeting in Victoria – where, incidentally, many investors have sold up and got out of the state because of draconian anti-landlord measures by the state government. So we can expect rents to keep rising in Melbourne.
In Adelaide, rents have fallen a little in the latest quarter in 17% of suburbs examined by PropTrack, but there’s no sign of plummeting in the other 83% of suburbs.
Adelaide, in fact, has had extraordinary growth in rentals in the past year and, with the vacancy rate still hovering around 0.6%, there’s no real basis for declaring that “the worst is over”.
In Perth, the vacancy rate remains well under 1% and there is no real prospect of rent relief any time soon.
So, looking through the entire article, the only evidence presented to go even close to supporting the noise in the headline is in Sydney.
According to this shoddy piece of “journalism”, Sydney has entered a correction phase.
PropTrack attributes the market slowdown to more rental homes becoming available and tenant demand dropping as more renters moved to share houses or back in with their parents to save money. Migration has also waned in recent months.
PropTrack says: “Demand and supply are working together to see a stabilisation in rental market conditions.”
But no evidence was presented in the article to support the notion that Sydney rents are nosediving.
So, in summary, only in Sydney is there evidence that “the worst is over” and there is nothing at all in this work of fiction is justify the claim that rents are plummeting – anywhere.
So, what is a realistic overview of the situation with the rental shortage crisis.
Nationally, the vacancy rate continues around 1% or slightly above 1%, depending on whose figures you believe.
None of the eight capital cities has a vacancy rate anywhere near 3%, which is the benchmark for a stable rental market with steady rents.
There are no government measures in play which will move the dial on this in the foreseeable future – except decisions which are likely to make it worse, rather than better.
In some locations, however, I do expect rental increases to moderate, because a ceiling has been reached in terms of the market’s ability to pay.
Amid a cost-of-living crisis, tenants cannot keep paying higher and higher rents, regardless of how many people they jam into a three-bedroom house or small apartment.
But rents plummeting? We’re unlikely to see that anywhere, not while vacancies are as low as they are.