Our expensive housing

I dunno how but Australia's housing has shown nothing like the declines like overseas. Much to the angst of many people I'd guess. Sydney is diabolical. Younger people often simply just leave and find work somewhere else as to buy something first off is way out of reach. I dunno if it's still true but a year or so ago I was talking to someone who their son was buying a unit locally here; half a million $ it was. Just unbelievable. Then that affects the rents too. You can pay $500 a week now in eastern Sydney easily to rent a 2 bedroom unit. As I live in an old dump for 5 years now it's against the law to increase the rent by an unreasonable amount, but if I had to move I think I might be rather in the shit.

Maybe there's hope for us mere renters though. People are actually starting to think that housing won't be the boom industry it has been in the past. It's all very well to make money out of property investments, but what happens when the prices get so high that many people simply can't afford to buy them? We're already there. Have been for years. Now with the rest of the world having property vastly less priced than ours, how can we possibly expect the property to continue to increase in price?

Ask any foreign money manager what scares them about Australia's stockmarket and they will invariably say the risk of a housing collapse because of gross overvaluations. It makes a lot of sense. Virtually all the Western world has seen house prices crumble since 2007 while Australia's residential market has defied gravity, recording only gentle declines. The median house price in Australia is six times the median household income - 30 per cent greater than the US and the long-term average. Read more