Economic updates

The demographic profile of a suburb shifts as the median price rises. At the top end of the market, the patterns become remarkably consistent across cities, and some of them run against common assumptions.

Average open home attendance has nearly halved in a year. The decline was well underway before the Budget and has continued since. Whether it has now found a floor is the question the latest weekly data is starting to answer.

A slowdown does not land on every suburb at the same time or with the same force. The variable that best explains which parts of the market are still moving is not price, location or demand. It is investor share.

Luxury property is often discussed as a single market. The suburb-level data across Australia's major capitals tells a different story, with each city sitting at a distinctly different point in its own growth cycle.

Behind every transaction is a person. At the very top of the market we can imagine the corporate executive winding down a long career or the inheritor of a family fortune, returning to a suburb their grandparents could have named.

The SMSF borrowing ban has been framed as a small change based on the official data. Whether that framing holds depends on where in the development process you start counting the impact of those buyers.

The price crash narrative is gaining traction, but the real risk is not a uniform national decline. It is a more uneven market, where the segments that had the most policy support are now the most exposed to what comes next.

The SMSF borrowing ban for residential property has passed the Senate. For most investors the immediate impact is limited, but understanding what changed and why it happened now matters more than the headline.

A luxury property category that has flourished across Asia, the Middle East and Europe is beginning to take shape in Australia. The developments emerging in Sydney, Melbourne and the Gold Coast mark the start of that shift.

Not all regional luxury markets moved the same way through the pandemic, and not all of them corrected the same way after it. The differences are not simply geographic. They are structural, and they have persisted.

At a national level, housing completions and population growth can look close to balanced. That conclusion depends on assumptions about household size that may no longer hold, and it disappears entirely at the state level.N

Higher interest rates and weaker confidence bite the top end of the Gold Coast first. Investor pullback bites a different part of the coast. Both are now in motion, and the order they move through the market matters more than the headline figures.