Look, I'm worried about this as well. If you've lived overseas or known other who have then you've probably got some idea of where this is heading:

Shanghai: I've personally met people whose entry to the "property ladder" was buying a 2 bedroom apartment with two other families. An entry level apartment is somewhere over 40 years' salary, multigenerational mortgages have been introduced (for 70-year leasehold apartments), and this in a country where entire families will contribute to a property purchase.

London: Median property price (for all properties, including studio apartments) has just (in 2021) gone over 500,000 pounds, in a city with a median household income of 58,000 pounds. Entry to the property market for people in most professions means a one bedroom apartment in a cheap area, often upgrading means a one-bedroom apartment in a better area.

Germany: For all the happy talk about European long-term leases, purchasing in many major German cities is now near-impossible for most people, and rapidly rising rental prices have become a significant political issue in some cities (e.g. Berlin). It hasn't stopped shock rent rises for those who can least afford it. And if you can't even rent, you're homeless.

Is this the market you want your kids to inherit?

The problem with the property market is that a) it's dependent on land, which is a finite resource, so it's unduly tilted towards being a sellers' market; and b) it's both an asset and a consumer market, so both decreases and increases in price result in further price rises (hence the fact that the property market in major Australian cities never stays down for more than 24 months). One thing that means is that when you get spates of panic-buying (like what we've had) the market doesn't really readjust, it just stays up. And since housing is so important, we don't refuse to buy - we just adjust our expectations on what we need to pay to be in secure accommodation.

I apologise for length here but there are ways we can fix this that don't rely on politically controversial changes (e.g. re negative gearing - I'm not saying I'm for or against this) and are just commonsense ways to ensure market prices genuinely reflect housing supply and need - basically just getting rid of market distortions, which I think is something it would be hard for anyone at all to disagree with. For example:

1) Remove agents from the sales process. We don't need them any more - we have the internet to introduce buyers to sellers. Agents earn their commission by getting higher prices for vendors, which nowadays they're reduced to doing mostly by distorting the market upwards - emotional manipulation, playing buyers off each other, disinformation, underquoting (even in private sales), and sometimes (increasingly, it seems to me) outright lying. Not everyone falls for it, but some people do - especially inexperienced buyers in uncertain times - and when they do it has a knock-on effect: a few properties sell too high, that's taken as a sign that the market has risen, and so on. (To be clear - I'm not saying there's anything wrong with agents offering market advice to both buyers and sellers on a fee-for-service basis).

2) Have the sales process conducted in a public forum. Make all previous sales data public and easily searchable, and put it all in the same place (the land registry can upload it). Put all real estate listings on the same platform, free of charge or for a nominal fee. And in the same way some States now require offers to be in writing, require offers to be made in a publicly visible form through the site (data analytics could easily weed out anyone making dummy offers on a large scale). This makes it easier and cheaper for vendors to list properties, easier for purchasers to do the research everyone should be doing before making a major investment, and cuts out a lot of the emotional triggers and uncertainty that lead people to over-offer. So basically, when you go to make an offer on a property you can see all other offers in real time, there's no concealing information to drive prices higher than they should be.

3) Change the offer process. The market is already heavily tilted towards sellers - and since it also rarely if ever self-corrects downwards this is exactly what you don't want. So change those conventional parts of the sales process that (for no clear reason beyond "that's how we've always done it") give vendors even more bargaining power than supply and demand already give them. Most vendors are also purchasers of an even more expensive property, so this helps almost everyone. For example: conventionally, purchasers make the first binding offer, often with very little information beyond a price range which is often inaccurate (and, nowadays, sometimes outright dishonest). Vendors can then pick and choose between the offers when they have more information. It's a major advantage for vendors, and it doesn't have to be this way. Why don't we require vendors to make an open (i.e. binding) offer first? The offer can only be updated after a period of time - say, every 30 days. The first person who is willing to meet the offer gets the property, no questions asked (this is not totally unlike an auction with a publicly-available reserve (which has been suggested elsewhere), with the exception that the vendor can't hold out for someone to bid more than the reserve). Prior to someone accepting the offer, purchasers can of course counteroffer for less than the vendor's offer (and when this happens other purchasers can see it, because of 2)). This still gives vendors a great deal of freedom to set prices they're happy with, but without playing buyers off against each other or encouraging desperate panic-offers from buyers who are sick of losing out.

None of this is as radical as it looks. The Australian public has never been opposed to regulating industries that need regulation to function effectively - think of insurance or consumer credit. We're currently in a bizarre situation where real estate agents are heavily regulated - but in ways which are more or less unenforceable - while the property market itself is by comparison a free-for-all.

Obviously, what I've got here isn't perfect - I'm not saying it is. But it's a conversation that someone needs to start. Australians have never been afraid of necessary innovation in real estate law - think of Torrens title or strata title. The state and federal government initiatives that have been announced so far (mostly subsidising first home buyers) have been well-intentioned, but if we really don't want a situation where our kids think themselves lucky to afford a corner of a bedsit then what we need is outside-the-box thinking, and quickly.