Dec 4, 2022
Sydney House Prices Down about $33,000 in the 60 days I was Banned from r/ausfinance.
$163,800 (11.7%) since the Peak on 13 February.
Other Key Figures:
- $16,480 in November
- $2,400 so far in December (last four days)
- $5,030 last week.
- $585 Today.
- Average daily fall of $557
Background:
Earlier this year, upon realising that CoreLogic updated their house price data every day, I started making a habit of translating their index figures into dollar amounts. This helped me get my head around the scale of what was going on. It also gave me a chance to run a daily test of the software my company has created, which captures and shares research as videos, as in the video bibliography above.
I’m not trying to become a smash hit property blogger. But I did want a beat that I had a real interest in, so that doing daily posts wouldn’t be too much of a chore. Sydney house prices fit the bill since they’ve impacted my life personally, and those of many people I know.
And yeah, maybe there’s a tiny bit of schadenfreude, too, now that the shoe is on the other foot. For those who haven’t been in a position to buy, it’s been no fun at all watching prices gallop off into the distance.
After rising at an unreasonable rate, they are now falling at an unreasonable rate. The average Sydney homeowner cannot afford to be losing >$500 a day. House prices should not be this high, or this volatile.
They are, I have argued, an interesting example of a global asset bubble which has come about due to ever lowering interest rates over the previous three decades.
These falling rates are a product of insufficient aggregate demand and the risk of a deflationary spiral (which technocratic central banks were mandated to respond to with monetary policy). The low aggregate demand was a product of insufficient wage growth and too much government austerity. This deflationary background forced central banks into the most inflationary possible postures, then when real inflationary pressures came along, it all started to fall apart.
These bad policies, like many others (including around climate change, for example) were a result of the undue influence of money on politics and our dysfunctional media ecosystem, which no one in their right mind attempts to defend.
They can only be addressed after reforms to media practice and culture, which Stone Transparency hopes to catalyse.
If methodology becomes the marker of real journalism, rather than popularity or institutional endorsement, we can start to have a serious, good faith discussion about things like economic policy.
In the meantime, I will be tracking these numbers every day (with occasional exceptions, as earlier this week due to travel). I won’t be posting them in r/ausfinance (or any other sub) daily. so you’ll have to follow me here, on Mastadon or on Reddit if you want to stay updated.
