Prosper Australia

Tuesday Oct 2nd, 6.30pm 1/27 Hardware La, Melbourne Presenter: Philip Soos RSVP $5 entry Does Negative Gearing increase rental supply? Is it a path to wealth or a black hole? Download the full report (PDF) Philip Soos has assembled an extensive array of data to dispute the policy’s effectiveness in delivering housing affordability. Julia Gillard’s [...]

Reprinted from On Line Opinion 6 Sept 2012 The apathy of economists about the costs and burdens imposed upon modest citizens is staggering, as though this is their natural lot and there is nothing to be done. Housing is a perfect example. We see young adults rejecting home-ownership because without future price appreciation, taking on [...]

The ABS Eight Capital Cities House Price Indexes 6416.0 released today shows the property market is totally stagnant with prices unmoved, says Prosper Australia. “Property spruikers calling ‘Bottom!’ based on this data – and they will be – are misleading homebuyers. Sadly, they have come to believe their own one-sided narrative,” David Collyer Campaign Manager [...]

20 June 2012 There are 90,700 vacant houses in Melbourne – 5.9 per cent of the total – according to Earthsharing Australia’s 5th annual Speculative Vacancies Report. “Our lazy land use makes a mockery of the drive for affordable housing,” researcher Philip Soos said today. Vacancy hotspots include: Docklands 14.1%, Williams Landing 13.5% and Truganina [...]

Dwelling construction continues to fall, according to the AIG-HIA Performance of Construction Index for May. Commercial construction and house building activity weakened to 34.7, where anything below 50.0 represents contraction. In parallel, the ABS Building Approvals graph looks like a ski slope, down 24.1 per cent in a year. 380,000 houses are openly for sale [...]

A nifty clip from our South African colleagues Karen Cooper and Peter Meakin. Of note is their useful method comparing 300Rd p/m in land rent to the 60,000Rd we currently pay to banksters.

Today’s Sydney Morning Herald has a breathless article about a flipper couple who bought, renovated and have for sale a Marrickville terrace. The underlying message: there’s profit in the renovation game. My back-of-envelope calculations based on the article’s figures show they will lose around $43,000 on the transaction if they sell for the $680,000 mentioned [...]

As the Fairfax papers reported on April 14, the NSW government has rejected yet another recommendation to replace conveyancing stamp duty by a broad-based land tax. That is the effect of the “stamp duty replacement tax” recommended on page 13-4 of the Lambert Report, delivered in September and quietly released in February. It is often said [...]

Australia has experienced nine quarters of falling land sales volumes with the last five quarters flatlining forty per cent below long term averages. The big falls in prices we have been predicting are now a certainty.

Philip Soos notes eight of the nine substantial property price increases over the last 131 years have resulted in a decline. He can’t see why the largest increase on record would not precede another drop now. Soos does not buy the argument that Australia is suffering from a “chronic housing shortage”, saying property prices have continually experienced boom-bust cycles regardless of population growth.