Eliza

Yeah, so this is really interesting and it ties into some recent news that we've seen over the past few weeks about the state of the rental market.

The fact that vacancy rates are broadly still really tight across Australia.

We've even seen a little bit of re-acceleration in the pace of rent growth.

So the rate of growth was cooling down there for a bit.

It's picking up a bit now.

And it essentially means it's a landlord's market.

So my colleague, he's an expat.

He's come from the US.

And he was somewhat appalled at the state of some of the rental properties that he was inspecting.

So things like, you know, curtains that had just been torn down, marks on the walls, marks on the carpet.

And he was really surprised to see rental properties presented like that.

But it's just unfortunately the state of the market that I guess not all landlords would bother to worry about that sort of thing because they don't really have to.

Yeah, so I got the standing tickets, but we paid like $260.

Plus, on top of that, you have to pay a handling fee, so it usually comes out more towards that fee.

So because you buy it through third parties like Ticketek, they charge a little bit extra because you've had to go through their website and for their paperwork.

I was going to say early Christmas present, isn't it?

Whether you're in the market to buy something or a bit more rate relief coming from the RBA.

It's interesting though, we've still seen households hold up extremely well through interest rate rises from 2022 to peaking in November 2023.

Things like reducing savings and putting more money towards mortgage payments were

putting a little bit less into offset and redraw and putting more into principal and interest payments and also the savings buffers that were built up through COVID really saw a lot of financial stability during interest rate rises, mortgage arrears have remained quite low and now we're starting to see a bit of an improvement in household conditions as well.