Michael Janda

And I'm ABC News Business Editor Michael Yarder.

Always a pleasure.

I mean, I love the property market, but even for me, sometimes it feels repetitive to come in here and talk about auction clearances.

Yeah.

Well, there was an interesting article in one of our competitor publications, Sydney Morning Herald, Shane Wright, an excellent economics correspondent, looking at this polling that they'd had done, which showed that a majority of Australians, including a majority of current homeowners, wanted to see property prices fall.

And a very small minority were actively opposed, with quite a big group then sitting in between the two and kind of unsure.

Caveat there is it's always one thing to ask people what they want to happen, but when they go and try and sell their property and the real estate agent says, you're probably going to get a couple hundred grand less, do they feel the same way?

And that's probably what the government's weighing up in this.

That said, of course, if you're just an owner-occupier,

And the only property real estate that you own is the house you live in.

Then for most people, if they sell it and they buy another house and both fall by the same percentage, give or take, it makes no difference whatsoever.

In fact-

For someone like me who's in a position where maybe I need a bigger house because I've got a few kids, and when they get bigger, I need more space, it might actually be a benefit because in dollar terms, the more expensive bigger house is going to have a relatively bigger fall.

than the house I'm currently in.

So

Even then depends where you're downsizing to.

If you want to go to a coastal lifestyle market, maybe you'll get an even bigger discount there because there's a lot of properties, you know, what really are people's holiday homes, but they rent them out enough to try and claim them.

and claim the negative gearing on them, which the tax office has already been tightening down on.

But with these rule changes, that strategy is out the window because you can't negatively gear it.

So if you want to retire to a coastal market, might even be good news for you in terms of property prices.