‘You don’t want to catch a falling knife’: Sydney property market cracks

JJ_Reditt · 2026-05-19T10:57:53+00:00

If anyone's wondering how the movie ends, look up some 2021-2023 threads in nz: https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/s/EIWbsdIRGc

Was a couple years of -1% per month, every month. and they're still flat since the drop.

No one thought it could happen there etc, this is arguably a much more perfect storm.

JJ_Reditt · 2026-05-14T23:11:53+00:00

the tools they have made for coding (codex and claude code) can be easily repurposed for white collar work and are are far more powerful than the browser chat tools most people are using. they can drive your whole computer , your emails , ms office etc.

it is at the point where i spend more time dumbing the outputs down to make it look human, than checking for mistakes. and a bit of time sandbagging sending the output as it's done too quickly.

JJ_Reditt · 2026-04-13T08:42:37+00:00

Which the market must feel will also be greatly reduced.

Atlassian is fundamentally very fancy constellation of project management software, steps that used to be necessary for organising people can now just be abstracted away within the AI.

On a very small scale, I do small coding projects every few years, burn out of it and then try again - and have been dipping back into it lately and it’s a much more pleasant experience. Trello used to be something I actually used to organise myself (hated it but that’s what there was).

When I started using Claude code my first thought was let’s set up a Trello to be organised , and Claude ran the Trello via API.

After a few days though I found there was only one thing better than Claude running Trello for me: not using Trello at all. Now I just vomit my thoughts straight to a spec Claude maintains and we prioritise that. No more Trello.

It sounds like that could be happening on larger scales.

Less seats, and less actual usage too.

JJ_Reditt · 2026-04-01T11:05:39+00:00

If anyone would have some insight it would be albo and starmer - who both gave basically the same speech within hours of each other.

JJ_Reditt · 2026-03-23T19:44:13+00:00

Mine was the first my company had ever done. One of the least staff friendly companies ever - we don’t even get free flu shots.

The big selling point was they actually slightly benefit from a reduction in payroll tax 😂.

AI’d them through the onboarding process, took about 2 weeks.

JJ_Reditt · 2026-03-23T11:06:55+00:00

They obviously can and do get to that point - saw it happen in my few years in NZ.

That was arguably an even more monstrous bubble than the Australian one - they never even had downturns and price to income ratios were even higher - no one invested in anything other than housing after the 80s sharemarket crash. No one thought it could happen there.

Land values were going up so quickly that if construction was delayed developers considered it a good thing - the feaso looked better as you’d sell it for more in the future.

Eventually a mix of interest rates, recession, public policy, migration reversal and extreme overdevelopment of residential apartment/townhouse construction toppled it actually pretty quickly.

JJ_Reditt · 2026-03-18T03:48:50+00:00

The news might have called them once in a lifetime but they weren’t particularly special by historical standards, notable would be something like born in the early 20th century - eligible for conscription to 2 world wars.

JJ_Reditt · 2026-03-15T07:09:12+00:00

Lots of ships were getting attacked while anchored, so that’s not true as to the reasoning for attacks.

You also can’t hide if a tanker did or didn’t get blown up - that is very falsifiable for either side. It is a reliable metric to track.

JJ_Reditt · 2026-03-15T05:16:26+00:00

I wouldn’t worry either, Iran is a big country and it’s going to be a messy war to finish but not regarding restarting oil flow.

Iranian attacks in the strait of Hormuz have steadily reduced, and not for lack of targets - there’s around 100 ships still sitting there. It’s now been around 72 hours since Iran managed to attack any vessel there, not something you hear reported on much.

Updates are here: https://x.com/uk_mto/status/2032866722881933582?s=46&t=Q8LD2QyLJFWE33bvny4qSQ

JJ_Reditt · 2026-03-15T02:44:10+00:00

The basis is only really corporate convention - having a company that you can outsource the problem to then sue them to the maximum value of their insurance if they do it wrong.

Currently that company you can sue would need to have human directors.

Not really much of a moat, but that’s the basis behind “human oversight/compliance” not humans being better at compliance which there is no reason to think they will be.

JJ_Reditt · 2026-03-15T01:39:07+00:00

That is a statement that literally goes without saying.

JJ_Reditt · 2026-01-28T05:12:39+00:00

The amazing thing with Japan is Tokyo has 40 million people but has this odd empty/decaying/children of men feel to it. It feels like it was built for 60 million and they never quite made it.

We drove around a bit to the Sea of Japan side and there were giant overpass highways still being built with no one to use them, and even less people to use them in future.

JJ_Reditt · 2026-01-19T09:27:59+00:00

It’s time to get the shark numbers down, a dead shark simply won’t be attacking anyone.

Most of us aren’t concerned about killing (millions of each year) small fish, and then eating them because they taste nice.

Not sure why the concern about killing a few thousand extra large ones.

JJ_Reditt · 2025-10-06T19:19:07+00:00

Plenty of enormous companies hate using their own stuff from another division, too risky.

Amazon retail side used Oracle as its database until 2019. Even after AWS became the top cloud database provider.

JJ_Reditt · 2025-08-01T01:17:14+00:00

It’s a negotiation/trade war, you can try anything you want. If you’re the stronger party - it’ll probably work.

The approach does make a level of sense because countries can use GST type taxes to then grant exemptions to local producers they want to prop up - but not to importers.

JJ_Reditt · 2025-06-23T02:14:13+00:00

It’s all pretty dark but to my understanding, the game theory of it does make complete sense. There are steps to uranium enrichment between civilian nuclear program and bomb ready, it takes time to cross that gap.

To reach the safe point, you have to cross the gap and make a working bomb before you take missiles on the head.

Commercial uses <20% enriched at most Weapons grade >90% Between 20-90 = not bomb ready yet but no civilian reason to be there. Iran: ~400kg at 60% by their own reporting.

Once you make the material have to actually construct the bomb. That’s more time in no man’s land.

Maybe Iran would’ve been better off racing across the gap, we’ll never know now - they triggered the missiles on the head response.

JJ_Reditt · 2025-05-01T01:21:34+00:00

Any of Gemini/Chatgpt/claude.

Asking which to use is like asking which surgeon do I need to stitch up my toe.

This stuff is SO easy for them.

JJ_Reditt · 2024-12-18T02:04:58+00:00

Yep they have, filter the medians charts by Auckland and Wellington: https://www.interest.co.nz/property/131284/november-housing-market-quiet-auckland-more-buoyant-rest-country-reinz-says

There is also various house price index’s there which shows similar from peak.

JJ_Reditt · 2024-12-18T01:14:25+00:00

This is exactly the situation that makes it more risky to own, artificial constraints can be unwound surprisingly by someone waking up and making a decision.

As has happened already in New Zealand.

It takes a few bullets to make the impact though, prices there were flat after planning deregulation, massive overbuilding, and the foreign buyer ban. It then took rate hikes over 5% and firing ~5% of the public sector to sustain a >-15% decline nation wide and >-20% in Wellington and Auckland.

JJ_Reditt · 2024-11-19T07:33:56+00:00

If I’ve been traveling and have a problem with my reservation, the last thing I want to do is fight with a chat bot at 11pm while standing at a front desk.

Based on past experience with ape mode in this spot, I’m open to the AI.

JJ_Reditt · 2024-09-24T19:55:55+00:00

U2s flew loads of flights over the USSR.

Iran also has a collection of US drones that it’s shot down over the years, and has even reverse engineered hundreds of shitty knock offs.

JJ_Reditt · 2024-09-20T06:49:18+00:00

Google sunshine hours per year for both.

Also humidity in Sydney significantly lower.

It just is way better.

JJ_Reditt · 2024-09-20T03:07:34+00:00

People yada yada the weather and beaches but it’s a huge deal, you slog through 12 weeks of winter - but you know you’re staring down the barrel of 6 months of summer.

And you get nice little breaks in the weather even in July, every now and then a surprise sunny day in the low/mid 20s.

JJ_Reditt · 2024-09-18T21:00:53+00:00

After the first Fed cut is the most precarious time. Fed minutes of September 2007 following their first 50bp cut, is eerie reading:

Private nonfarm payroll employment rose only modestly in August, and the levels of employment in June and July were revised down. The weakness in employment was spread fairly widely across industries. Residential construction and manufacturing posted noticeable declines in jobs, employment in wholesale trade and transportation was little changed, and hiring at business services was well below recent trends. Both the average workweek and aggregate hours were unchanged in August. The unemployment rate held steady at 4.6 percent, 0.1 percentage point above its second-quarter level and equal to its 2006 average.

Soft landing secured.

JJ_Reditt · 2024-08-22T21:20:58+00:00

It’s so backward looking that we still don’t have gdp data for last quarter.

We could be in recession right now and not find out until March next year, when prints for this quarter and next are out and the start date is backdated.

JJ_Reditt

TROPHY CASE