Property Investing

Housing affordability can be thought of as the relationship between average expenditure on housing and average household incomes. In an ideal world, household income and expenditure on housing would increase similarly over time due to inflation, resulting in fairly stagnant affordability. But of course, we know that this hasn’t been the case for Australia!

Recent years have seen an incredible explosion in the popularity of ‘short-stay’ rentals. Sites like Stayz, Vrbo and Airbnb have made it extremely simple for investors to experiment with short term renting in favour of conventional, long-term, rental agreements.

As we venture further into the digital age, a seismic shift in the conventional work setup — from traditional office environments to remote settings — is reshaping the landscape of our society and, by extension, the real estate market. In today’s article, we’re investigating a few of the defining trends at play, and discussing what they could mean for us as property investors.

Recently, there’s been no end of provocative and alarming headlines written about the Australian economy, with words like ‘crisis’ and ‘recession’ readily thrown around. A major driver of this concern is that Australia’s yield curve has inverted – something that hadn’t happened previously since 2008. But what makes this a big deal? And what is a yield curve anyway? To break this down, we first need to understand how government bonds work and what makes them an important component of the economy.