Charles Vargas

 Some investors are attracted to the cheap house prices and very high rental yields in resources sector towns but recent events in two of the nation’s iconic locations demonstrate why this can be a strategy fraught with peril.   Hotspotting methodology dictates that a diverse economy is a core factor in any location we […]

 I sometimes despair for Australians trying to make sense of real estate markets, when the standard of analysis and commentary in news media is so poor.   Knee-jerk responses to short-term data sets from economists, journalists and often from the big-name research houses create a mass of confusing, conflicting and contradictory commentary.   The

 Regional Queensland had a pretty good year for price growth in 2024 but I’m predicting it will have an even better one in 2025. There’s mounting evidence that the combined weight of internal migrants moving to Queensland and investors increasingly pivoting from Western Australia to Queensland will drive significant price uplift this year. In

 Since the start of the pandemic in 2020, many of Australia’s property markets have experienced some extraordinary price growth. Many locations, both city-based and regional, achieved unprecedented price increases with median house and unit prices soaring as demand hit new highs. Where once a million-dollar house or unit median was unusual, that recent growth

 Was the Federal Treasurer being serious when he suggested that investors pass on the new interest rate cut to tenants in the form of cheaper rents? Has Jim Chalmers lost the plot completely or was he making a shallow pitch to voters on the eve of a Federal Election? To suggest that investor owners

 One of the most significant housing stories in the past year has slipped under the radar of news media, with very little commentary.   The latest official data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that it now costs over $500,000 to build the average house in this country. That’s the cost of construction

 Price data for Sydney provides a striking example of why it’s so important not to generalise about property markets.   According to the big-name research sources, Sydney prices grew only a few percent overall in the past 12 months, but individual precincts within Greater Sydney have recorded price growth at boom levels.   Unfortunately

 The trend we have dubbed the Exodus to Affordable Lifestyle is one the key reasons we expect Regional NSW to deliver strong residential property markets in 2025.   The trend, of course, is not new – with big cities like Sydney losing population to internal migration for the past 10 years.   But the

 Prospects for strong buyer demand in 2025 look good, with the latest data released by the Reserve Bank indicating a significant rise in loans for home buyers, investors and businesses. This challenges earlier predictions of a slowdown by economists, who continue to be obsessed with interest rates as the big factor that determines everything

 Hotspotting has been forecasting, recently, changes in the pecking order of price growth among the major markets of Australia – and the latest research data confirms it.   Regional real estate and apartment markets are the out-performers in the latest figures from CoreLogic – which also show that Perth is no longer leading the