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News
Every news article on Burbfinder, sorted by latest. 27 articles in this category.
News8 min
Reading RBA monthly financial aggregates: housing credit, the owner-occupier vs investor split, and what shifts mean for prices
Four numbers in the RBA's monthly Financial Aggregates decide whether housing prices have fuel left. The headline is the least interesting of them; the split between owner-occupier and investor credit is where the actual signal lives.
News8 min
Reading APRA monthly ADI statistics: what bank-level housing loan composition reveals about the property cycle
APRA's bank-level data shows where credit is actually concentrated. Reading it well gives you the institutional mechanism behind a price cycle a quarter or two before the price indexes catch up.
News8 min
Reading the ABS Wage Price Index: what wage growth tells you about property prices that house-price indexes don't
Wage growth is the variable property markets care about more than any single data series the property industry publishes. The ABS Wage Price Index is the cleanest read of it.
News8 min
Reading the REIA Real Estate Market Facts: what the quarterly REIA prices tell you that CoreLogic doesn't
The REIA Real Estate Market Facts is the oldest national price series in Australia. It still matters, and the reason is what it captures that the algorithmic indexes don't: settled sales reported by agents.
News8 min
Reading the PropTrack Buyer Demand Index: the leading indicator that arrives months before prices move
The PropTrack Buyer Demand Index measures intent before transaction. When the BDI turns, the price indexes follow within a quarter or two. Reading it well is mostly about lag arithmetic.
News8 min
Reading the ABS CPI housing component: rents, new dwellings, and what the RBA actually watches
When the RBA cites housing inflation, it is adding two subindexes that move on different drivers. Reading them separately is the difference between understanding the print and just quoting the headline.
News8 min
Reading CoreLogic listings volume: what new vs total stock-on-market signals about the property cycle
CoreLogic publishes two listings numbers most readers compress into one. New listings and total stock move differently across the cycle, and the gap between them carries the signal.
News8 min
Reading ABS Housing Occupancy and Costs: the 30/40 indicator and what it actually measures
The ABS Housing Occupancy and Costs release is the cleanest national read on affordability, and the 30/40 indicator inside it is the most-cited and most-misused number in Australian housing debate.
News6 min
How to read major-bank cash rate forecasts without taking them as truth
Bank economist forecasts are a research product and a marketing artefact at the same time. Read the spread, not the headline number, and the consensus starts to mean something.
News8 min
Reading ABS Net Overseas Migration: how the demand-side number lands in housing
Net Overseas Migration is the single biggest swing factor in Australian housing demand and the most volatile number on the ABS release calendar. Read the trend, decompose the visa mix, and watch the revisions.
News8 min
Reading the RBA Financial Stability Review: the property signals inside the twice-yearly report
The Financial Stability Review is the RBA's twice-yearly stocktake of how close the system is to breaking. Most of its conclusions are about property even when the chapter headings aren't.
News6 min
How to read PropTrack's monthly Home Price Index without overreacting
PropTrack and CoreLogic land within a few tenths of a percentage point most months. When they diverge, the gap is usually the most interesting thing in the release.
News6 min
How to read CoreLogic's Monthly Housing Chart Pack in 15 minutes
The chart pack is roughly 80 pages and the news wrap quotes three of them. The other 77 are where most of the useful reading lives.
News6 min
How to read SQM Research vacancy rates without being misled
A 1.2% vacancy rate sounds dire until you remember it's a count of online listings against an estimated rental base. Here's how to read the SQM series.
News6 min
How to read ABS Lending Indicators without misreading the market
Lending Indicators is a flow series, not a stock one. Read it as a 1-3 month lead on settlements, and the headline starts to mean something.
News6 min
How to read the RBA Statement on Monetary Policy without the headlines
The post-meeting communiqué is roughly 600 words. About forty of them carry signal. Knowing which forty pays off in concrete dollars on your repayment.
News7 min
Reading CoreLogic's Pain & Gain: what loss-making sales tell you
A median price index can climb while the bottom decile of resellers crystallises real losses. Pain & Gain is the series that catches what the headline number hides.
News8 min
The 50% CGT discount under threat: what the 2026 Budget actually proposes
Tonight's Budget proposes ending the 50% CGT discount for new investor purchases from July 2027. Announced, not legislated. Here's what it does to the numbers.
News8 min
Negative gearing 2026 Budget: the 12 May cutoff and grandfathering
7:30pm AEST, 12 May 2026 is the line. Contracts signed before it keep negative gearing for the life of the holding. Contracts signed after lose it from 1 July 2027.
News7 min
Foreign-resident CGT withholding is now 15%: the one CGT change already law
Every Australian buyer transacting with a foreign-resident vendor must now withhold 15% of the price at settlement and remit it to the ATO. The threshold is gone.
News9 min
Would CGT and negative-gearing reform cool property prices?
The headlines say reform will crash prices. The serious modelling says 1 to 3% over a decade. The compositional effect is the bigger story.
News7 min
Wages vs mortgage rates: how to read the serviceability gap
Three percent wage growth doesn't mean serviceability is improving. It depends entirely on what mortgage rates did in the same year.
News7 min
How the RBA cash rate flows through to Australian property prices
A 25bp RBA cut does not lift prices by 25bp. It lifts the marginal buyer's borrowing capacity by roughly $15-20k, and prices follow with a lag.
News8 min
Federal housing policy in 2026: Help to Buy, Home Guarantee, and the schemes that actually pay out
Help to Buy shared equity, the three Home Guarantee tiers, and the stacking rules that decide whether a federal scheme actually saves a first-home buyer real money in 2026.
News7 min
Australian property market outlook 2026: what the major forecasters are saying
The 2026 forecast spread is wider than the headlines suggest. Here's how to read CoreLogic, PropTrack, SQM, and the major banks without picking a side.
News6 min
Rental vacancy rates in Australia 2026: what the numbers actually tell you
A 1.5% vacancy rate signals rent growth ahead. A 3.5% rate signals stagnation. Here is how the number is measured, what it means, and where each capital sat in 2025-26.
News7 min
How to read CoreLogic's daily home value index without getting fooled
The HVI ticks every weekday and the headlines treat each tick like news. The daily number is mostly noise; the monthly change is where the signal lives.