Prosper Australia

12 January 2012 Prosper calls for timely, rigorous and transparent statistics on property sales to be collected by the ABS. “Property is the single largest asset market in Australia – worth around $5 Trillion,” Prosper Australia Campaign Manager David Collyer said today. “It is of profound importance to individual and national prosperity. The lack of [...]

The Australian property market ended 2011 on the ground in a foetal position after a serious assault by Harsh Reality. Symptoms include: • A year’s supply of unsold houses on the market • Low and falling building applications • Low and falling finance approvals • Failing auctions nationwide • First home buyer indifference • Universal [...]

10 November 2011 MELBOURNE:- The Growth Corridor Plan announced by the Baillieu Government presents Melbourne with big challenges. How to pay for the massive infrastructure needed is front and centre – and unmentioned in the Plan. “Demand for new and better transport links around developments and the extra traffic burden they bring onto the existing [...]

photo credit: DrWurm A term employed in Vagrancy statutes to test whether an individual has any apparent ability to provide for himself or herself financially. The Law frowns upon people who make their living outside formal employment. Yet it bows deep before land and property. Irrational confidence has inflated property prices so far they bear [...]

18 October 2011 MELBOURNE:- “House prices are falling in Melbourne faster than US prices did when that property bubble burst,” Prosper Australia Campaign Manager David Collyer said today. “The enormous housing oversupply and sudden buyer caution have dramatically switched the Australian trend. Anyone standing aside from the market will have saved themselves an average $50,000 [...]

photo credit: tm-tm On Sunday 9 October, The Sunday Age published an article by Chris Vedelago Buyers Nibble but No Big Bite. I would link, but can’t see it in The Age online. Here are the money quotes: “But a survey conducted by The Sunday Age found that only 35 per cent of properties actually [...]

photo credit: Jakob E 28 September 2011 MELBOURNE:- 40,000 young families turned away from a lifetime of heavy debt and bitter disappointment in the last year refusing to accept Australia’s grossly inflated house prices, according to a survey overnight by website RateCity. “Here is the evidence FHB’s are on strike, as we announced in March,” [...]

photo credit: Soon. 17 September 2011 MELBOURNE:- Exponential growth in the number of unsold properties overhanging the Melbourne market continues, up 18 per cent in the last month alone. “In the last five months ‘Stale Stock’ in Melbourne postcodes 3000-3207 has exploded, from 19,800 to 45,499 properties. In the wider Melbourne and environs, 70,856 houses [...]

photo credit: sky_mitch State Treasury’s brief to the incoming Baillieu Government, the Blue Book, urges tax reform to drive Victoria’s competitiveness. The Blue Book has apparently been leaked to The Age. It strongly recommends lowering the burden of state taxes, particularly business charges and Stamp Duty. “The Liberal-National Coalition should seize this opportunity for reform [...]

photo credit: dcmaster Barry O’Farrell was elected Premier of NSW in March this year. His first budget announced Tuesday raised a storm of protest – not over a realignment of government priorities to his conservative Coalition’s agenda, but on Stamp Duty. The previous Keneally ALP government had exempted first home buyers (on houses up to [...]