Labor's tactic of taking the fight to property investors with its negative gearing and capital gains tax proposals could prove costly across a range of its blue-ribbon seats on May 18, where property prices have fallen starkly. So says the Real Estate Institute of NSW, which has released figures showing that of the 50 property markets across Sydney that are most likely to be hit by Labor's policies, 40 are Labor-held electorates.
Not that the fall in prices is doing much for affordability for society's most vulnerable, apparently. Anglicare's recent survey shows fewer than 1 per cent of properties across Greater Sydney and the Illawarra are affordable for singles and low-income families. UNSW City Futures Research Centre reckons the way to tackle this is to cut out the developers; developers, on the other hand, rightly point out government isn't in a financial position to become the builder.
In the midst of this debate, in wades the Climate Council saying this could all be moot; it reckons Australian real estate values could plunge over the next decade due to climate change, predicting collective losses of $571 billion in values.
Mortgage insurer, Genworth held its AGM yesterday. Predictably, it talked down the prospects of an improvement in the housing market; it's seen profits drop 45 per cent over the past 12 months.
Yesterday, we heard that 15,000 real estate jobs have been lost in Australia since the 2017 peak. Today, JPMorgan has released Australian job market analysis showing close to 140,000 manufacturing, construction and retail jobs have been lost in the first quarter of 2019. It reckons publicly-funded job growth has "masked underlying weakness in the labour market."
Speaking of real estate, and the story of the week has been the pending departure of Purplebricks - and the scramble of other players to pick up the space they're leaving vacant. Today's top aspirant is Airlisting, which is panning the Purplebricks model in the AFR courtesy of Su-Lin Tan and spruiking its no-agent DIY platform.
Australian golfer Craig Parry isn't bothering with such sniping; he's quite happy with his agent, Black Diamondz for shifting his Abbortsford pile for about $10 million.
And if you thought that's steep, consider this: Propertyology research has revealed that Byron Bay is now more expensive than Sydney. Bad news for any cash-strapped buyers hoping to become neighbours with Chris Hemsworth.
I thought we'd get a break from this for at least a couple of days, but it's not to be; people are still banging on about Reserve Bank rates today. This time, fund managers Ellerston Global Macro are saying the RBA will be forced to cut rates immediately after the election; they reckon Australia's interest rate pricing is "the most mispriced in the developed world."
Not that you'd expect the RBA to get a big thing like that right, given its apparent lack of attention to detail. It released 46 million newly-minted $50 notes last year with the word "responsibility" misspelt. If you have any pineapples in your wallet, take a look.