US doomsayer Jordan Wirsz's Australian housing bubble predictions rubbish

Jordan Wirsz is at it again. This time, thankfully, not many here in Australia are listening to him.

In this latest diatribe, Wirsz claims that he has been studying human behaviour for 22 years. In the past he has tried to have us believe some fairly hard to swallow claims, but that one has to take the cake!

You see, Wirsz was born in 1983, making him barely 29 year of age.

I have five children. I think back to when each of them was seven.  My eldest was a bit of a larrikin – I still recall the day when he set the sprinklers to the “on” position right in the middle of his dad’s work barbecue. Of course, all of the staff were picnicking on the lawn at the time, but it was true seven-year-old behaviour, and most of us were able to laugh about it. My three girls were most likely playing with Barbies at that age and my youngest boy, the studious one, would have been reading a young person’s book.

Studying human behaviour? It conjures up the picture of one of them sitting at the dinner table, thoughtfully stroking their chin and saying to me, ‘you know mum, Mrs Wilson next door has an interesting response to the post man, and I’ve been pondering this peculiar behaviour’!

It’s rubbish, as is much of what Wirsz claims to know about the Australian property market, one which, by his own admission, he researches using Google.

Further, he states that he has learned to “virtually ignore all media/news, because most of the time, they are wrong”. He then goes on to say that ‘this is because they are listening to so called “experts” who have agendas’. Has anyone asked Wirsz how he makes his money? It looks to me like it’s from running seminars and real estate classes, ones that give you the strategies to employ after he has wound you up with his press releases and lathered you into frenzy about the latest gloom and doom.  If that’s not an “agenda”, then I’d like to know what to call it.

He seems to have lately jumped ship a little – from talking about the woes of US real estate to now saying that “the normalcy bias is keeping many people too fearful of buying real estate, which is going to create an exaggerated bottom, just like we saw an exaggerated top”. He now wants to buy into a market that he said, not that long ago, was doomed.

And, in the latest blog (littered with grammatical errors, which I will ignore because, let’s face it, he’s a product of that younger set), he couldn’t resist another swipe at Australia. He says that he has done a lot of research on the Australia real estate market, and can see some “very significant signs that they are almost exactly where the U.S. market was in 2008”. Who knew it could fall so much?’

He thinks Australia is in for it in a “big way” and invites you to “stay tuned for more later”. I gather this means another webinar – more money-making for Wirsz.

I gather he is doing his research on Google again, because I am finding much more encouraging news from some fairly reliable sources.  Housing affordability is improving monthly, and the average Australian now spends below 30% of his or her income on the average home loan payment, with even better results expected in the coming months. Australians are repaying debt too, with more than 50% of all mortgage holders now in advance on their loans, many of them over one year in advance. We are great ones for hunkering down and shoring up for that rainy day, even if the signs show we may not need it. Lenders are being careful, and under the new credit reforms our lending policies, already tight with an abundance of integrity, just got stronger, providing further protection.

And look at all of those areas in the country today with low buy in prices, growing population and housing shortages.  With technology allowing us to live and work in areas other than capital cities, the choices for housing have become more and more diverse and available, and the Australian people’s confidence in property values remains as strong as ever.

The figures don’t lie. The September quarter showed some slow, albeit low, growth in many markets, as we carefully creep along, prudently buying, bargaining hard but keeping property values just about where they should be given the world economic outlook.

Let’s listen to true experts – you know the Australian ones. Like Tim Lawless from RP Data, who forecasts rising housing prices for the major urban areas of Australia. He says “based on index data over the month up to September 28th, dwelling values across the combined five largest capital cities of Australia are likely to increase by around 1.4% over the month of September, and the quarterly rate of growth will be around 2% over the quarter – that's the strongest quarterly change since May 2010”.

And what of those other real experts – those guys over at BIS Shrapnel? They say that house prices in Sydney, Brisbane and Perth will recover over the next three years, which sounds pretty good to me.

My money’s with the guys who know.  The ones who live here and make the details of our markets their life’s work.

Jordan who?