Reporting on the Australian property market, updated through the trading day.
Australia told Gen Z that renting was the price they had to pay for being locked out of homeownership. Now rents are surging, wages are falling behind and young Australians are being priced out of the last stable housing option they had left. Are we creating the country’s first generation without a secure place to live?
Advertised rents in Perth are 7.1 per cent higher over the year, the fastest of any capital.
Melbourne enters spring with the deepest pool of stock of any capital city. Agents report vendors are pricing to meet the market rather than testing it, keeping clearance rates stable even as choice widens.
Sydney's clearance rate of 67.4 per cent is the highest of the capitals and has now held above 65 per cent since mid-June.
Adelaide continues to record the lowest advertised stock per capita of any mainland capital.
Interstate migration has slowed from its 2023 peak but remains net positive, and Brisbane's rental vacancy rate of 1.0 per cent continues to push renters into ownership earlier than in the southern capitals.
Builders are declining work that would have been taken without hesitation five years ago. Fixed-price contracts, insolvency risk and a thin subcontractor market are converting a planning problem into a delivery problem.
Regional Victoria's two-year decline has ended, led by markets within commuting distance of Melbourne.
Gross yields above 4 per cent in three capitals, combined with a stable cash rate, have brought investors back into a market they largely vacated in 2023.
Submissions published this week describe assessment timeframes that have doubled since 2018, with referral authorities identified as the largest single source of delay.
The two-speed office market has widened again, with owners of secondary stock facing repositioning costs that increasingly exceed residual value.
Melbourne has spent four years underperforming the national index. The reasons are structural rather than cyclical, and they explain why rate cuts have had less effect here than anywhere else.
The May cut lifted median borrowing capacity by about $34,000. Sales volumes across the combined capitals are 2 per cent lower than the same period last year.
A data analysis of 1,240 suburbs identifies where the house-apartment relationship has inverted, and what those markets have in common.
The sector has moved from pilot to fixture, and is now large enough to influence advertised rents in the inner city.
Opinion: the standard reading of first home buyer data confuses a compositional shift with an affordability improvement.
Transport investment is moving to the growth corridors where population is already arriving, reversing a decade of inner-city concentration.
The study finds that identical apartment layouts cost between 4 and 13 per cent more to deliver depending on the state in which they are built.
Construction capacity, not funding, is the binding constraint on the current social housing programme.