Inside the Data: What Cotality's Economist Really Sees

In this episode of Property, Straight Up, host Warwick Brookes sits down with Gerard Burg, economist at Cotality (formerly CoreLogic), for a data-driven conversation about what is actually happening in Australian property right now.

Gerard works with national property data every day, and he brings that perspective to some of the biggest questions buyers, sellers and investors are asking. From Melbourne's slide down the national leaderboard to Adelaide overtaking it for the first time in history, from the structural supply crisis no government target will fix quickly, to the apartment submarkets where owners have been losing money for nearly a decade.

They also cover the early signals from the negative gearing and capital gains changes, what three consecutive rate rises have done to first home buyer confidence, and the one mistake Gerard says buyers will look back on and regret.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Melbourne's underperformance is real but overstated. Affordability is drawing buyers priced out of other markets.
• Adelaide overtook Melbourne for the first time in history, driven by pandemic population shifts and inadequate supply, not fundamentals that are likely to hold.
• Construction costs and trade shortages mean new supply will not rescue affordability anytime soon, but they do put a floor under prices.
• Melbourne CBD unit values peaked in March 2017 and have not recovered. Oversupply, not demand, is the story.
• The negative gearing changes will discourage investment, but it is too early for the data to show exactly how much.
• Three rate rises have started to cancel out the benefit of the government's 5% deposit scheme for first home buyers.
• The investors who come out ahead are the ones who act on opportunity when it appears rather than waiting to time the bottom perfectly.

ABOUT DOMAIN & CO

Buying or selling a home is one of the biggest decisions of your life. Often the biggest financial decision you'll ever make. Bigger than anything else you'll sign your name to.

And the people meant to help you make it have started to look a lot like the people you didn't trust in the first place.

The polished ones in the sharp suits. The corporate machines who never learn your name. Or worst of all. No one. Just you and a portal and a hunch.

We've spent thirty years on both sides of property. The buy and the sell. The boom and the bust. The houses that grew. The ones that didn't. The agents you'd want in your corner. The ones you wouldn't.

We've walked the same families through five, six transactions across decades. First home. Family home. Forever home. The next chapter after that.

So we don't pitch. We don't perform. We don't take work we don't believe in. We just tell you what we'd do, if it were us in your position.

For property, told straight. We're your property people.

https://domainandco.com.au/

Timestamps

 00:00 – Introduction 

00:54 – Guest Introduction: Gerard burg, Cotality 

01:36 – Gerard's Career Background 

03:18 – How Cotality Analyses Property Data 

04:09 – The CoreLogic to Cotality Rebrand 

05:28 – Media Narratives vs. Real Data 

06:14 – The Case for Melbourne as an Investor Market 

08:04 – Adelaide Overtaking Melbourne Explained 

09:50 – Melbourne's Supply Advantage 

10:49 – Construction Costs & the Trade Shortage Problem 

12:19 – Investor Policy & New Build Requirements 

14:33 – Post-COVID Buyer Behaviour Shifts 

15:53 – Data Overload & the Buyer Advocate Boom 

17:46 – Melbourne Apartment Losses: The Data Story 

20:08 – Undervalued Pockets in Melbourne 

21:41 – Negative Gearing Changes: What to Watch 

23:14 – Rate Rises & First Home Buyer Capacity 

24:47 – Five-Year Outlook: What Matters Most 

25:35 – Close 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

One thing I've learned after nearly 30 years in property is that behind every property transaction there's a story, a big decision, and often a lot more emotion and complexity than people expect. This podcast is all about giving you access to the people, insights, and strategies behind smart property decisions so you can make better moves, whether you're buying your first home, investing, selling, downsizing, or planning your next step.

SPEAKER_02 0:25

Welcome back to the Melbourne Property Brief with Warwick Brooks. Today we're diving into the numbers, the trends, and data shaping Australia's property market. More importantly, what they actually mean beneath the headlines. Because one thing I find fascinating is that the data often tells a very different story to what people are hearing in the media. With affordability pressures, changing buyer behavior, supplier concerns, interest rate conversations, and major policy discussions continuing across Australia. There's certainly no shortage of things happening in the property market right now. I'm joined today by Jared Berg from Curtity. Jared is an economist who specializes in translating property trends and market data into insights people can actually understand. Curtelity, formerly known as Core Logic, sits behind a huge amount of property data, research, and analytics used across real estate, banking, valuations, and property industries every day. Jared and the team are often seeing behavioral shifts in market movements before the broader market even realizes they're happening. So I think this is going to be a really fascinating conversation. Jared, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks, Rocke. It's great to be here. Jared, before we dive into the market itself, can you tell us a little bit about your role at Cotality and your background in property economics?

SPEAKER_01 1:36

Yeah, well, I guess my role is to really sit in front of the data, I guess, and communicate what we find in the property market out to stakeholders in the industry, the media, and the wider public as a whole. You know, we'd look at conditions in the underlying economy, look at what that means for buyers, what it means for sellers, and try and just translate a lot of the technical jargon into things that people can really understand. My sort of history and property economics specifically is reasonably short. I have a long career as a macroeconomist looking at the kind of big picture. So prior to joining Cotaldi, I spent the previous 20 years at National Australia Bank. And given the importance of property within, I guess, the banking sector in Australia, you know, I always had a uh a bit of a focus within there, particularly when we were out speaking to clients about what was happening in the property sector. I'd usually do a presentation half hour to 45 minutes where I was um you know looking through the big economic trends and spend about five minutes on the property market at the end. That was the bit that most clients were most interested in every time I was speaking. So that was kind of the intro into coming into Cotality.

SPEAKER_02 2:39

Yeah, great. I mean property data would have been a very big thing at the Commonwealth Bank considering their portfolio.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

Yeah, well, I mean, all of the big four banks are very heavily focused on property. And now sitting on the other side of the desk, uh we have obviously very close relationships with each of the big four banks and then other lenders as well.

SPEAKER_02 2:57

Yeah, great. One thing I find fascinating is that your team is often seeing behavioral shifts before the broader market even realizes it happening. What does Cotality actually do behind the scenes and how much property data are you analyzing day to day?

SPEAKER_01 3:10

We sort of absorb so much data from all over the country in terms of different segments that might be producing insights into the property sector. So obviously close relationships with the value of general departments around the country that are ultimately the source of truth for all things related to property transactions, but also tie-ins with real estate agents and uh other sort of interested parties, obviously the banks as well and lenders. And the fortunate thing is I don't have to do too much of the direct analysis of that raw material. We have a team of amazing data scientists who sit behind us who process the data, clean up all the noise, and help us really pull out the clear signals that we can get out of the data so that we can actually bring something of real value to the broader market.

SPEAKER_02 3:54

Yeah, great. And I think this to kind of for people, especially in real estate who probably do know about the Cotality name change, but for people who don't know, Cotality was previously core logic, and it has been core logic, was core logic for a long time. What was the name change for?

SPEAKER_01 4:11

Yeah, so I think one of the things that people perhaps aren't aware is that Cotality is actually an American company. So it was a decision made at headquarters to make the name change. I think the while Core Logic had a lot of brand recognition, I think to someone outside the property sector didn't necessarily tell them a great deal about what it was that we did. The sort of logic of bringing together a modern corporate name, I believe the decision was the co-part reflected the cooperative nature that we have with our partners uh across the industry. It was then totality to sort of sum up that we cover the entire breadth of the property market and vitality as well to sort of say how much we bring the data to life. So that sort of explains the background to the name.

SPEAKER_02 4:52

It's a good name for it then.

SPEAKER_01 4:53

But we're still facing the reality that a lot of people didn't necessarily pick up on it. Um so personally I feel like I'm on a one-man mission uh every time I'm out with clients to sort of explain that. I don't know, we made that change.

SPEAKER_02 5:03

We use your your platform every day, and people in our team still go um talk to us core logic, and we keep it kind of half people saying fraternity, half on core logic. So we're slowly getting across there.

SPEAKER_01 5:14

I think it means my mission is not accomplished yet.

SPEAKER_02 5:17

One thing I really find interesting is that the headlines and the actual data can sometimes tell very different stories. Do you think there's currently a disconnect between media narratives and what the numbers are actually saying?

SPEAKER_01 5:28

I think when you look at the media perspective on the property sector, I think it's very narrowly focused. And I think it's true across economics more generally that there's no conditions that are universally good or bad. People often have perspectives on an individual economic statistic and think that means something specifically good or bad, but it's actually a kind of a neutral thing, it impacts people in different ways. And so I think that's true of what we're seeing right now in the property sector as well. You know, a classic example, I suppose, is the headlines that Melbourne has lost its crown, that you know, it's underperforming. And certainly if you take uh an investor's point of view, that would be absolutely true. For example, you're looking at uh the market from the perspective of the first home buyer, probably cheering. You see that your dollars go a lot further here in Melbourne than they do in, say, Brisbane or Perth or Sydney. Um I think that perspective that there are different sides and different angles often gets overlooked.

SPEAKER_02 6:19

Going back onto that Melbourne point is that a lot of investors in the last 12 months have left the other markets because they do perceive that Melbourne is potentially in a situation it historically has not been, and that they're they're banking on the fact that it may return to its position in the leaderboard. But it's we're going to be really interesting to see how that kind of pans out.

SPEAKER_01 6:42

I think that's a realistic outcome that we could see in coming years. I think there has been some broad negativity, and again, some of that coming from media perspectives about Melbourne as a whole. But the demographic trends that we see in Melbourne, I think, are encouraging towards perhaps regaining that position in the leaderboard, and particularly over the longer term, we're seeing that affordability advantage being something that could draw a lot of people to the city over the next five years or so.

SPEAKER_02 7:07

Yeah, well, I think our government hasn't helped with their land tax positions and just in general where people perceive Melbourne. But hopefully that yeah, it does turn around for a lot of people.

SPEAKER_01 7:18

Yeah, I think the investor side of things, as we say, you know, those sort of have been discouraging. But again, the contrast of where the headlines have put things versus perhaps what you see in reality. You know, there's been headlines that Melbourne has been uninvestable, that it's just impossible to. And I think the most recent data that we've seen in terms of investor share of lending, for example, just trending higher, yes, lagging behind the national average, has sort of pointed to that being, you know, a little bit overblown to where things have been. And of course, the latest budgetary changes sort of probably upend the entire investor picture across the country and also really changed the picture quite significantly.

SPEAKER_02 7:51

That's another story that's gonna take a little time to unfold and see the data coming through, but it's going to um definitely have an impact. One of the things that I think a lot of people are surprised about is the fact that Adelaide has overtaken Melbourne for the first time in history. Is that largely a supply story?

SPEAKER_01 8:06

It's all like the relativities of supply and demand in each of these individual markets. When you look at what's happened in terms of the supply of new housing over the past few years, I think it really is quite instructive as to what has happened over this period. So when we look at the amount of homes completed start of 2020 through to Q3 of last year, the most up-to-date data available from the ABS, around one-third of that total number of houses completed was here in Victoria. And there was a strong bias towards the standalone house that clearly there's still this revealed preference that a lot of buyers still have for the traditional home with a backyard. So that delivery of supply into Victoria, and obviously specifically Melbourne in a large extent, has really helped keep that lid on the overall increase in home value growth over that period. Whereas Adelaide and South Australia more generally, the period during the pandemic we saw a lot of flow of people into Adelaide, whereas previously it's been a place that people often left, particularly sort of young workers moving for opportunities on the East Coast. It was a significant reversal of what the longer-term trend was, helping to push up that demand in the city. Supply was somewhat inadequate to meet that demand, and we saw the consequent increase in home values that's really pushed Adelaide much higher. When you look at a sort of broader story of Adelaide being a city of 1.5 million people or so versus Greater Melbourne pushing up above five million, it's a very different market. And I think what we were talking before around what might be the natural order of things longer term, I don't know that it's sustainable.

SPEAKER_02 9:39

Yeah, so just on the kind of you mentioned about how the Victorian has kind of led the way in housing supply, do you think that will become Melbourne's advantage in the future?

SPEAKER_01 9:47

Well, it's definitely made Melbourne much more affordable, as we've said than other cities. There's a lot of anecdotal data, and unfortunately, anecdotes is often some of the stuff that we have to rely on in these sort of things that people priced out of other markets around the country are increasingly looking at Melbourne as being somewhere that they might see a viable option, particularly given again the size of the city and the employment base, not going to be missing out on income moving to a city like Melbourne, and that income to cost basis just becomes much more attractive. So we can see a scenario where demand significantly picks up within Melbourne above the sort of levels that we've seen over the last five years or so, just built on that affordability advantage that the city has.

SPEAKER_02 10:30

Yeah, and just going to the on the supply side of things and the increase in construction costs. And I mean we know because we're looking at sites that essentially it's very difficult now to get any development to stack up from a to make profit. The developers are not going to be building. The building costs have gone up a lot. We can't get enough trades to build the houses because a lot of them are getting paid a lot more on big build projects. And what do you guys see that I mean, I I personally don't think we're going to be able to build the houses that we just don't have the ability to do it. What kind of impact do you see that's going to have in five to ten years?

SPEAKER_01 11:10

Well, in the short term, I guess it it really puts a flaw underneath any potential downturn that we're seeing right now because there's just a limited ability to add to the stock of houses. And it's where the affordability advantage that Melbourne has from the demand perspective is lost on the supply side. Because if you're looking to build a house that costs roughly the equivalent amount, no matter which major city you're looking to build it in, you're probably not going to look at Melbourne. You might be looking much more at, say, Brisbane or Sydney or perhaps Perth, although Perth has its own trade issues, I guess, getting getting access to the construction labour. But those other markets where those values have risen so much more rapidly become a much more feasible option for builders to be undertaking construction than Melbourne is right now. It's another factor that when you see that affordability, the potential demand side benefit that Melbourne has, it's quite constrained on the supply side of new buildings and therefore can potentially see that reversal of the trend that we've seen most recently. Yeah, it's definitely a a path forward.

SPEAKER_02 12:10

Yeah, I also think that if you're looking into what the government are proposing with that if you auto-invest in property, they're pretty much only letting you buy new builds. I feel that the only thing that's gonna do is put the prices up. If these developers are going, well investors have only got this option, therefore I can charge more for that, which is gonna just put more pressure on first-time buyers. Um it's gonna be really interesting to see how that kind of all kind of plays out as well.

SPEAKER_01 12:36

Yeah, I mean I think it's one of those ones that it's not clear until we get some real data on what's happening that we'll really know what's gonna happen. I think there's a a range of scenarios, but I think overall investment is definitely going to be discouraged by the the policy. We've seen for such a long period of time that investors have preferred existing stock over new builds. New builds carry with it a certain amount of risk, I guess, that perhaps they previously had been avoiding. But it'll be interesting to see how development changes from this sort of policy. Particularly, I think the challenge of providing rental stock within the kind of inner and middle ring suburbs of our cities. Well, I mean, there's there's still the potential of knockdown rebuild uh of obviously not a single property if you're knocking down a single and you can't replace it with a single. That's an expensive exercise.

SPEAKER_02 13:25

It is in reality, it's gonna make somewhat do the opposite. It's gonna make the rich richer because the people that can afford to do that are already wealthy. Your mum and dads who are trying to get ahead in life, it's just out of their scope of being able to do that. Yeah. And I think that it's going to in these innerring, we've lost so many inner ring properties already in Victoria due to land tax and people selling. And most of those houses are being sold to homeowners. They're not being resold to investors because a lot of them are, even from a compliance perspective, a lot of them are the compliance is getting too difficult on older homes. I think that what we're going to see now is a lot more of those still selling, and we're just not going to see enough new stock come into these areas for the amount of people that want to live in there. And if you go and look at what the government are trying to achieve, the new house lay packages are 40, 50k from the CBD, in my opinion. The younger generation don't want to live there. So your first-home buyers are not going to just go, okay, I'm going to go live out there. I want to still live in the city. So and they want to live there, so they've got to rent. I do think there have been a lot of articles, but I do really think it's going to put a lot of pressure on rents going up. But we'll see. Yeah. So do you see like Australians and property pre-COVID to now, different behaviours?

SPEAKER_01 14:42

Yeah, I mean things have evolved, I guess, in terms of what a lot of buyers have been demanding. We certainly saw in that early stage of COVID the real demand for greater space. You know, we saw a a significant downturn in the unit sector, particularly the the smaller unit stock. People were looking for room for a home office or you know, room for just even a little bit more space, so when they're limited in what they can do elsewhere, their home was a bit more of a castle. I think that has persisted a little bit. The thing that's going to be interesting, I guess, from the kind of rental side is if we start to see a bit of a shift around the size of occupancy within rental stock, because that certainly took a significant downturn during COVID as well. A much more increasing trend towards living alone, and then just smaller household size sizes within rental homes. But now we're seeing that obvious pressure from rising rents once again, rental affordability is becoming increasingly stretched across the country that potentially people might be re-evaluating what their needs are, what they can afford, what their wants are, all sort of come together to change the the shape of those households uh going forward.

SPEAKER_02 15:51

As buyers these days have got so much information. There's so much data available to them. You guys are a data powerhouse. There's a lot of smaller players coming into the market trying to be different. And data can be interpreted differently. And what we've seen in our industry is an explosion of buyer advocates or buyer agents, especially younger ones without a lot of experience, who are on kind of they look at data or they read something from some of these smaller companies and they twist it to mean a certain way. How do you kind of see that all of this data available but it's not kind of being read the right way and being thrown out there in for the benefit of not the consumer, but I suppose for what they want to throw kind of direct people into?

SPEAKER_01 16:37

I think it's the risk of too much data becomes noise and it's where you're really looking for clear signals out of the noise. And yeah, I mean there's there's definitely associated with that. I think it's also where buying house is a higher motion sort of purchase, isn't it? It's hot very high value, but it comes with that higher motion, and I guess anytime there's that sort of scenario too, it adds a bit of risk. And I think that probably explains a lot of the the growth in things like buyer advocates, just in terms of people want to try and get a bit more sense of what is the real value, what is signal that they should be looking for, rightly or wrongly, it can be that challenge. I think to my own home buying experience, which was going back many years now, but definitely my wife and I made it on on high emotion. Uh, we put in an offer sort of before we even really knew much about the area. Um, and fortunately we we made a very good choice, but uh, you know, it was definitely an emotional one over a very rational what you know an economist would pride themselves on making a very sensible, reasoned decision.

SPEAKER_02 17:38

One area that is generating a lot of discussion at the moment around kind of our circles with Melbourne apartments, particularly newer builds. We've seen many owners experience limited growth and a lot even losses over 15 to 20 year periods. What's the data kind of saying about the future of that market?

SPEAKER_01 17:58

Yeah, I think when you look at the losses that have been incurred, they're very localized in sort of key segments of the city. So the Melbourne CBD, for example, you know, we saw a peak in unit values there back in about March, I believe it was, of 2017. And values have sort of slid from that time onwards. When you look at sort of the broader story around profit and loss in terms of uh home ownership, holding a property for about 10 years tends to be the the median that we see across the country, and it generally results in a strong outcome. But as work out from that little um piece of data there, you'd be making a a loss out of the Melbourne CBD over that time period. So it's a bit of a different situation. There's also been weakness in Port Phillip and in um Stonington West. And the thing that sort of brings them all together when you look at it is rapid increase in stock. Yes, the supply areas. Yeah. When there's sort of and I guess that is the the nature of you know apartment developments that they'll often be large scale, very lumpy, so add a lot of stock in in a very quick amount of time. And sometimes it's faster than the market overall can tolerate.

SPEAKER_02 19:06

Yeah, and I think a lot of people also don't take into consideration the government changes to planning. A lot of people invested in apartments prior to 2017, and kind of after that they really increased the supply. They increased, they changed what they would allow in different suburbs. And we saw areas like yes, Donington, Burundara, like Hawthorne, for instance, like Belt Road, just was crazy. Like big block after big block, and it made a massive oversupply, which is similar to what the CBD is. And it's going to be interesting with the new zoning of activity centres where they're wanting to even push that supply further to see whether or not it's going to continue kind of pushing out that lack of growth in that segment. Do you think some parts of Melbourne are becoming undervalued compared to the rest of the country?

SPEAKER_01 19:51

I think when you look at that sort of longer-term path of where Melbourne as a whole is likely to go, we were discussing before, I think there is sort of large chunks where those areas that are relatively more affordable really are likely to see some pretty substantial growth over a longer term period. And so it comes to, I guess, proximity versus value sort of equation between them. I know when I look at a a map of Melbourne, you know, we often will show clients a heat map, and you look at uh you know this sort of sea of colour of high value across the southeast and eastern suburbs, obviously, but in a sort of similar radius swinging round to the west, and you see Foots Gray as a pocket where you know there's sort of still comparatively more affordable, perhaps still has a little bit of that negative association from its history. But I think you know, proximity and sort of value and cost will just continue to be a story. I think going back far enough when I first moved to Melbourne, you know, Richmond was still had a bit of a downtrodden attitude to it. And then you know, sort of Fitzroy still did, and those gradually uh disappeared as gentrification continued through the area. And I think that's still sort of one of the big forces that leads to substantial value growth over time, is that story of gentrification. And so even as you get into sort of you know the middle ring in Melbourne, I guess, stretching from kind of the north through the west, there's still comparative lower value across that than you know, if you go the same direction to the east. That's still where I think you know you see probably the the greatest amount of growth.

SPEAKER_02 21:20

Yeah, I agree with that. So it's been a lot of conversation following the recent budget around negative gearing, capital gains tax, what that means for investors pretty early on in since it's happened. Um not sure if the data is starting to see any sentiment behaviour or yet, but kind of when would we start to be able to see some kind of conclusive data to see any shifts?

SPEAKER_01 21:41

Yeah, I think this is one where again it's signal and noise, and suddenly it's been something that that we've been quizzed very heavily over the last uh you know week and a half, I guess. We sort of flagged that the immediate results coming out of auctions from the following weekend was that Sydney was much weaker and Melbourne was a little stronger from a Clara. Right perspective. But we definitely weren't hanging our hat that that was a story. It was the, you know, the strongest investor market versus the weakest investment market, alternatively, strongest first-time buyer market in Melbourne, having different results uh sort of immediately after this policy change. Perhaps it was something, but perhaps it wasn't. And it's it's this thing where we have to kind of wait and see. We're doing our best to see if we can find something in the data that that can really reveal something a little sooner. But you know, it's hard data on investors' borrowing activity, which is often comes with such a lag, is perhaps where we'll see the first definitive proof that that something has been changing. But yeah, we're working as feverishly as we can behind the scenes to try and bring something out a little quicker that uh that might show some real insight.

SPEAKER_02 22:43

So there's also a lot of focus on when the Reserve Bank meet next. From your perspective, how sensitive do you think the market is to the interest rate movements?

SPEAKER_01 22:53

I think it's different segments that really fill these interest rate changes much more significantly. And it's particularly first home buyers when you've got a limited budget to start off with, when you're you know at an earlier stage of a career where you you're a bit more uh dependent on uh those repayments and how large they are, and just borrowing capacity as well is is hit by it. So I think that's really the segment that is most impacted. We've been looking at first home buyers in a large extent over the last few months, just following the the changes in government policy again to provide them with the boost of the 5% scheme, but that has appeared to start to fade as we've now hit the third rate rise this year. So I think that's sort of counteracted the benefit that they'd previously received around the deposit scheme.

SPEAKER_02 23:37

Yeah, it's really interesting. Like they want the first homeowners to buy properties, but every time an interest rate comes through, their borrowing capacity drops and it just makes it harder for them. Do you have a prediction on what's going to happen the next one?

SPEAKER_01 23:48

I think the most likely scenario at the moment, and that's assuming that we don't get a surprise in inflation data, is that this might be a hold. Increasingly, the market pricing is pointed towards that, particularly following the unemployment data that came out last week and that it moved up a little bit higher. That may give the Reserve Bank enough confidence to say we'll sit and wait and see where the data takes us. The challenge, I guess, that we've seen so far is that there's always that long lag between the full impact of a rate rise really hitting the economy versus how quickly they can have a meeting. Yeah, there's estimates that it's in the range of 12 to 18 months following a rate increase that you actually see the full effect. So three in three meetings hasn't really seen enough time to show what's happening in the real economy as a result of this. So if they get an inflation read this week that looks a little bit better, or at least gives them enough comfort that things aren't going completely out of hand, I think then a hold is on the cards.

SPEAKER_02 24:47

What trends do you think people will look back in five years and which they'd paid more attention to?

SPEAKER_01 24:52

I think anything, again, we were talking about that sort of emotional side of things and acting with emotion over a sensible reason decision is probably the main side of things. That includes sort of perhaps delaying a a purchase now in a scenario where we're seeing the market on the cusp of a downturn nationally already a couple months progressed here in Melbourne. But if you are looking to hold a property for a long enough period of time, the slight movements of a downturn, perhaps missing the bottom of the market, but in doing so, missing out on a property that really appeals to you is the risk. I think too much focusing on those dollars and cents at the point in the cycle when opportunity knocks, you need to take it and look through the cycle rather than the short-term ups and downs.

SPEAKER_02 25:35

I think what today's conversation really highlights is just how important it is to look beyond the headlines and understand the broader story behind the numbers. Markets move in cycles, sentiment changes quickly, and sometimes the opportunities or risks aren't always what people assume they are. Jared, really appreciate you sharing your insights and helping break down some incredibly important trends shaping the Australian property market right now. Thanks for listening to the Melbourne Property Brief, and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss the next episode.