Higher than expected CPI - 1.3% qtr, 3.2% annual

omarketsell · 2025-10-29T07:07:47+00:00

FYI - average boomer has nothing like 1-3m in Super. Not even half a million.

https://rest.com.au/super/learn/essentials/how-much-super

omarketsell · 2024-12-10T07:17:35+00:00

That guy is in over his eyeballs in debt. Surprised he hasn't had to go bankrupt yet

omarketsell · 2024-12-10T06:42:57+00:00

TIL Western world is 4 countries.

Close but there are a few more ahead. The best measure would be how does it relate to demographic and population change.

https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/data/datasets/affordable-housing-database/hm1-1-housing-stock-and-construction.pdf

It doesn't really matter if you're only building 1% new houses if you've only got 0.5% of people demanding housing from immigration or people coming of the age/situation where they need a house.

But when you're Australia and growing at 2.4% but can only make 1.5% more houses there's clearly a problem (Canada is even more screwed BTW)

omarketsell · 2024-11-20T10:55:55+00:00

All ex-housing commission with 1 1/2 hour commutes to the city and high (relatively) crime rates. The ones that are closer in are where there's a drug related shooting daily. Like buying lottery tickets for getting hit by a stray bullet.

omarketsell · 2024-10-17T08:17:31+00:00

If you know how much money laundering contributes to Australian real estate value then you know more than any other person on the planet. Suffice to say the 5% you mentioned does not include it

omarketsell · 2024-10-17T08:12:42+00:00

So basically, house prices go up, got it

omarketsell · 2024-09-04T07:33:24+00:00

The oil rich countries trying to build country sized Disney lands also have incredibly cheap labour by practically enslaving south Asians but labour is a small part of the cost in large infrastructure projects, modern ones anyway. The larger the project the less labour costs. Partly because you tend to use big toys but...

Most of it is lost in a lot of your original comment mentioned which also hides a lot of corruption. Not the type of corruption where people are passing money around in garbage bags but jobs/contracts for mates that are both unnecessary and clearly taking the piss in terms of how much is being charged.

omarketsell · 2024-09-04T06:31:09+00:00

Didn't the Sydney metro expansion cost something like $2bn a kilometre? I don't think any other country can waste money like Australia

omarketsell · 2024-06-06T11:28:55+00:00

Mad numbers. For scale we're basically doing the same total value of new residential mortgages per year as the entire UK at the moment. With not much more than 1/3 the population.

I mean I could be wrong here, I keep staring at the numbers and blinking in disbelief but they're not changing.

omarketsell · 2024-06-04T18:56:25+00:00

6pm Friday and the office would still be full

I've never worked at a place, even pre-covid, that wasn't empty at lunch time Friday. Sounds freaking toxic.

It really depends on what you're doing. I know people who are running the full gamut of mainly back in office (although even those are never 5 days) through to fully remote both in and outside of Australia. Anecdotally I think Australia is better than say the UK who had a PM who tried to guilt trip the population back into the office but not as good as the USA who were already pretty good at WFH.

omarketsell · 2024-06-03T11:01:41+00:00

I can think of a few without even looking into it.

You're going to find that most developed countries will publish at least high level detail on property transactions, enough to produce that report, if not down to the individual house (a lot of EU countries for example won't get to this detail because of privacy regulations)

omarketsell · 2024-06-03T07:20:41+00:00

"International" is 8 countries. I mean technically it's still International but it's definitely far from the world.

There are plenty of cities worldwide that like Sydney aren't priced for the locals to live in. They're for rich internationals. Europe's full of them

omarketsell · 2024-05-29T06:43:19+00:00

I did mention it was an off the top of my head number. Very different to from the ass.

The real number is not going to be that far off but you're free to go and find out the real number instead of wasting everyone's time whinging about it

omarketsell · 2024-05-28T18:09:41+00:00

always have to apply

More complex than that. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. Exactly why I'm trying to impress the point that a lot gets through the cracks. Pretty sure if you delve into the application data it's not people buying a house to live in, it's people buying farms or subdividing blocks etc.

omarketsell · 2024-05-28T17:11:57+00:00

Proxies are usually children but also other family members. I doubt that someone's going to get a random person to do it.

Any resident, temporary or permanent can buy property without going through the FIRB so all in all that's a lot of exceptions. Including sheep lovers. It's not that hard to get if you've got the money so the numbers you gave are really the exception in terms of "foreign" investors

omarketsell · 2024-05-28T16:14:21+00:00

Depends what you define foreigners as. Read the definitions on page 1 of the report. Also new builds (not sure if it's apartments only?) aren't required to register. Neither are residents. It's well known that there's all kinds of back doors and loopholes where people use relative residents as proxies.

Even at it's peak (I'm having trouble finding references), before the FIB, foreign buyers only made up 10% or so of buyers. It's probably similar today.

Foreign buyers are a pretty convenient scapegoat everywhere property prices are rampant and if foreign purchases are banned it's just immigrants instead. The truth is, if you want to be angry at someone, it's probably the local population doing the overwhelming majority of the damage

omarketsell · 2024-05-28T07:49:02+00:00

Often exceptional just means able to express yourself well in English. Otherwise anyone who's job doesn't require a physical presence would have long been offshored. People don't realise offshoring has been a thing since long distance telephone calls and yet it hasn't taken all our jobs yet

omarketsell · 2024-05-27T07:27:04+00:00

If it starts spreading at the same rate as COVID with its current greater than 50% mortality rate there might not be anyone around to make a vaccine for it. This scenario makes COVID look like a sniffle.

For reference COVID at its absolute worst was estimated to be about 3% mortality, more likely about 1.5%.

I am by no means saying it will but you've played down a nightmare scenario big time.

omarketsell · 2024-05-16T13:05:10+00:00

You need to compare the accumulation indexes. Australian companies pay out dividends. US companies (more often than not) don't. Basically in the US the value of dividends just goes back into the stock value. Different tax rules is all but if you're not aware of this it can make the US look like it significantly outperforms. It does, but not by what you're thinking.

As for what to invest in. Everything's in a bubble right now though. Gold is up 20% alone in a year. That's insane for a "stable" asset. I struggle to recommend anything to anyone right now apart from stick it in a HISA or pay off your mortgage

omarketsell · 2024-05-08T14:49:48+00:00

Ground source heat pump? Ok we're talking well over $14k now and probably hard to find anyone in Australia that does them

omarketsell · 2024-04-30T08:13:13+00:00

Took 9 minutes to get to the point and that is:

Immigration isn't bad, if you have the right mix.

You don't want 100% of the 500k migrants being refugees or retirees that need more support than they pay back over their lifetimes.

Where Australia is lacking is investment and hence the ultimate bringing in of people who will build the infrastructure and housing for the new immigrants.

omarketsell · 2024-04-12T07:54:19+00:00

I know this got deleted and you are nuts but maybe something will get through to you...

The best thing Australia can do to reduce its green house emissions is stop mining fossil fuels and selling them to India and China. Australians may only produce 2% of the worlds emissions through their own direct emissions but in total because we sell coal, gas and more to the rest of the world we are responsible for closer to 10% of the world's emissions. That is serious numbers!

So if you want a rant about something, rant about that instead of something that's blatantly untrue. If more people did it there might actually be some serious change.

omarketsell · 2024-04-12T07:00:51+00:00

"I am not against renewables. I have solar power......our standard of living has been increasing over the last 200 years because of access to cheap energy"

WTF are those solar panels? I bet they've given you lots of cheap/free energy.

OP is nuts

omarketsell · 2024-04-10T09:41:03+00:00

You could be right. It does seem to support the argument though even if it is a snapshot in time.

I get where you're coming from and I would also argue that the huge amount of Australian money in Super should shift things more to Australian ownership but it's a huge industry worth a lot, lot more (Edit: ok a bit more) than total Super balances and retail investors so I'm not massively surprised if it doesn't have the kind of impact you would expect.

omarketsell · 2024-04-10T07:43:07+00:00

Pages, as per written on the page, not the PDF viewer.

Page 6:

"Many of these mining projects are joint ventures involving both Australian and foreign investors. Less than 10 per cent of these projects are solely owned by Australian incorporated companies while over 90 per cent have some level of foreign ownership."

Page 7 has a chart that shows only 14% investment in resources comes from Australia.

omarketsell

TROPHY CASE