White hot? Off the boil? Bubble? The mad parallel world of Australian real estate
There’s a parallel universe in which Australian real estate has gone mad.
In this universe, the market changes almost every month. One month it’s white hot, the next it’s paused, the one after it’s rampant, the one following it’s off the boil and a month later it’s a bubble.
Not surprisingly, the citizens of the alternative universe Australia live in a state of constant flux and confusion. No one has a clue what’s really going on, least of all the people who write for the parallel media. In this world, you get to create your own reality by making things up.
Another significant difference in this parallel universe is that there are only two population centres in Australia, one called Sydney and the other Melbourne.
Actually, it’s not clear whether there are no other inhabits in alternative Australia outside the big two - or just that it’s been decided they don’t count, so anything that happens there is ignored.
Anyway, in parallel Australia the property market peaked back in October. That’s according to a company that mangles numbers called ridiculously premature data. But then the market surged again until, in February, it went off the boil, and ridiculously premature data declared another peak.
It’s a relief to live in the real world where the information is real and not have to suffer the insanity of parallel Australia, where misinformation is as rampant as the property prices.
Lo and behold, in this wondrous place of roller coaster real estate, the market re-surged and was rampant again in March – well, it was in the only two population centres that mattered.
Thank god we live in real Australia, where normality rules. Here it’s recognised that monthly data is misleading and therefore irrelevant, and that the long-term trends are the ones that matter.
In real Australia, it’s understood that two-thirds of the people live outside Sydney and Melbourne and that’s it’s wrong to extrapolate the Sydney experience to the whole nation.
It’s recognised that, in the past 12 months, six of the eight capital cities have had price growth of 4.8% or less – and therefore it’s wrong to suggest that price growth is rampant across the nation.
Things that happen in the parallel universe – such as journalists declaring that interest rates must rise because there’s “record-breaking” price growth everywhere and stating that “the surge in investors, including foreign buyers, has priced first home buyers out of the property market” – would never happen in real Australia.
In the Australia of the real universe, accuracy and balanced are cherished and only experts are allowed to write about important things like real estate.
Therefore, it’s acknowledged that the weight of evidence is that affordability is the best it’s been in 10 years and that foreign investors do not buy in the same markets as first home buyers and therefore have no influence on the prices paid by first-timers.
In this Australia, writers don’t give emphasis to month-to-month data, which is confusing and misleading, and they don’t give credence to publicity hungry organisations that spit dodgy data out of computers without proper scrutiny in their haste to be the first to publish, and accuracy be damned.
I must say, it’s a relief to live in the real world where the information is real and not have to suffer the insanity of parallel Australia, where misinformation is as rampant as the property prices.