Owen Raskovich

Another one might be international tourism and people coming for less than permanence days, so students and that type of thing that they need housing.

But at the moment, we've kind of got this, you could call it a freeze on migration, which means that these people aren't coming to the country, but they will eventually.

So that's a positive thing.

But at the moment, it's negative.

So this is a kind of thing that you should also factor in when you're thinking about property prices and maybe where their direction goes over time.

The final thing is, and this is a really, I guess, nuanced thing, and it sounds really complicated, but it really depends.

Property prices depend on the borrowing power of society.

So how much of their income is devoted to property and mortgage repayments versus other things in life.

And what we've found in recent years is that as house prices have gone up, the average loan size has gone up.

But interest rates have come down from over 17% in the 90s or late 80s to 0.25%.

I'm talking about official interest rates from the RBA.

You know, you've seen interest rates come way down.

You've seen migration go way up.

And all of the time, even though the average loan size is getting bigger, so the media will try and maybe try and scare you with this figure to say, loan to value ratios or loan to household debt, or sorry, household debt to income, they'll try and throw out all these different variables.

But what's really important to remember, and this is kind of more optimistic, is to think about...

the borrowing of people so the household debt figures relative to income so people are earning more these days but the final fact that you need to think about is if people aren't earning income i.e unemployment is rising how does that affect prices and what you would likely find is in areas where there is a mass unemployment such as wa during the resources fallout a few years ago you see that prices have come down

So that's another thing that you could think about, and it's another thing that goes into property forecasts.

But so what do I mean by all this?

Why does this even matter to me?

I'm just a person that wants to own a home or I've got one now.