I was just doing some research to formulate a response to another thread and I came across this site. I nearly burst out laughing when I read it. Property for Life - Why-invest It's a UK property spruiking article with some nice graphs and fancy catch cries, but the scary things is you can substitute the word "UK" for "Australia" and you virtually have a verbatim script of the same rubbish Australian real estate agents push. This article was of course published in mid to late 2007 before the UK property market crashed 20% only a few months after this article was claiming that property was the place to be! Here are a few great excerpts: Who needs rationality when you got statistics! Lucky for Australia we have a better sort of housing shortage... don't we? The UK interest rates are a hell of a lot lower now than they were 18 months ago and housing prices didn't go up... 20% in 6 - 9 months!! I don't know if I'd consider that "huge" or a "short" period... There nothing like "consistently high" returns and 100%pa ROI. Who ever said there's no such thing as a free lunch clearly wasn't a property investor! Ahhh - anyway I just thought I'd share the ironies of recent times as well as make sure people are swept up in the euphoria of talks of green shoots.
Chris Are you saying that we won't have another boom any time soon and my properties will not double in value as expected at 7-10 year intervals? The last peak we had was in 2003-4 so it's been 5 years since then and we had price stagnation or price drops so it would seem logical for prices now to start moving and in a year or 2 accelerate to double digit figures which will result to the next boom. IMHO
There is no reason why the Australian housing ponzi scheme can't continue, but I'd give it just as good a chance to crash as well. But don't worry if that does happen the RBA will do what the FED and BoE have being doing and just print money! So your housing prices will go up but your purchasing power will go down. Anyway this thread was more meant to highlight the fallacy that supply shortages, low interest rates and high immigration would save Australian property. The only thing saving Australian property is good credit supply, FHOGs, and a still optimistic public. If these things disappear, so will the prospects of housing price growth.
