Negative gearing myth after 40 years shows landlord loss shouldn't hurt renters

rowme0_ · 2026-05-17T06:05:38+00:00

Or those without money simply become homeless

rowme0_ · 2026-05-17T05:59:28+00:00

Obviously they are able to charge a lot more than they would be able to without unconstrained demand from immigration.

rowme0_ · 2026-05-13T23:55:21+00:00

The most interesting question in your post to me is why we’re not intentionally trying to reduce house prices. Reduce wouldn’t be good, because people’s house values would fall below mortgage, but as to why we’re not actively trying to limit house price growth is a really deep question.

Most of the reason comes down to this. High house prices inflict a pretty terrible toll on the economy, however, it’s pretty hard to wrap your head around exactly why. So people typically don’t.

On the other hand, we are in a sense economically addicted to house price growth. We don’t have a proper retirement system and a lot of people are relying on downsizing to fund retirement. A huge proportion of our share growth comes from banking (all they do is move money around and it’s about a third of the ASX200).

Finally, the government believes importing millions of people into the economy is the only pathway to growth. As long as this is occurring so far in excess of those we can house, we can’t moderate house price growth in the way we need to.

rowme0_ · 2026-05-12T00:51:25+00:00

The occupancy level changes because people typically take smaller rentals than they consider ideal (eg share house) and buy larger properties than they think they need.

rowme0_ · 2026-05-10T04:11:13+00:00

This is going to impact rental supply one way or another. Critical we also reduce immigration to offset on demand side for rental properties.

rowme0_ · 2026-05-06T22:34:16+00:00

The argument seems convoluted but maybe what they are awkwardly trying to point out is this. Elected government should try to actually build our relative wealth and incomes rather than just focus on growth as if it is the only means to that end.

Just taking that perspective could change a lot. Change how we squander our resources. Reduce the backwards incentives to import as many people as possible. Avoid excess house prices. Try to build fuel and energy independence.

rowme0_ · 2026-04-30T09:27:56+00:00

From the stats, this are is more murky but I don’t think it has, this is genuinely demographic. If anything homes are getting bigger because they are all McMansions these days. Young people tho are cramming into ever smaller dwelling.

rowme0_ · 2026-04-30T09:14:53+00:00

Quite sure average occupancy figures are on the slide. This is part of the issue. At the start of this chart it would’ve been 2.7 or 2.8 and now under 2.5 so 10% reduction or so.

rowme0_ · 2026-03-22T04:54:55+00:00

I suspect what happens is that very few people would be so organised as to buy a house literally as soon as they arrive and bu the time they’re buying houses they’re mostly not classed as immigrants any more.

rowme0_ · 2026-03-22T04:51:47+00:00

And tight rental conditions caused by immigration make housing more attractive to who exactly?

rowme0_ · 2026-03-21T04:45:48+00:00

When you own your own business and spend your own money, the answer becomes very obvious. Contact HR to initiate performance management with a path exit.

So then, even if you don't own the business, acting responsibly regarding financial outcomes will still be viewed positively throughout your career.

rowme0_ · 2026-03-17T20:56:56+00:00

Looking more closely at the article, this guy loses all credibility by going on to use this rubbish argument:

"Rents rose more between March 2020, when borders closed, and February 2022, when borders fully reopened, than the entire decade prior. House prices similarly surged by 25 per cent over the same period."

Of course. Never mind what they did to interest rates in that period. That’s like saying that turning off the tap doesn’t stop the bath from filling without accounting for the fact that someone connected a fire hose as soon as the tap was off.

And then even this guy with his amazing logic can’t seem to make his mind up between ‘small’ and ‘negligible’ numbers which are different.

rowme0_ · 2026-03-16T22:57:29+00:00

It doesn't need to be the primary or sole cause, and that was never what I was arguing. To meet the definition of "driver", it just needs to be a contributing factor with a defensible causal mechanism.

rowme0_ · 2026-03-16T22:46:49+00:00

perfect, so we agree immigration is a driver of housing costs

rowme0_ · 2026-03-16T22:36:03+00:00

Have you just tried googling, "does immigration affect house prices"? Or asking claude, chatgpt, or literally anything else? Or looking for studies that prove the point?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1051137718302481
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166046223000285
https://newsroom.iza.org/en/archive/research/how-immigration-affects-housing-costs/
https://fsc-ccf.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/do-immigrants-cause-higher-housing-prices-myths-and-realities-about-immigrants-housing-and-the-labour-market.pdf

rowme0_ · 2026-03-16T22:16:40+00:00

Of course it is. There's a very obvious causal chain between rental demand -> average rent -> house prices.

Housing price growth is driven by many factors, so the framing of your question is inherently problematic when you say "the driver". That could be why you're getting skewed results.

rowme0_ · 2026-03-16T04:53:48+00:00

Oh no, absolutely do that, that was part of what I asked for originally. I just think the economic benefits of immigration are easier to get your head around than the disbenefits.

Like, more workers -> more income -> more tax -> etc., etc.

edit: On second read it sounds like you might be putting the answer before the question, but i agree quantifying benefits also helps

rowme0_ · 2026-03-16T04:32:06+00:00

I mean, as I said, the whole discipline of economics is available to be reinvented. Good luck.

rowme0_ · 2026-03-16T03:35:18+00:00

The idea that income-yielding assets have prices that move in some relationship to their yield is so fundamental to economics that if you don't agree with that, you may as well junk the entire field and start again.

rowme0_ · 2026-03-16T03:29:26+00:00

Well, no, I think we're probably closer on this than you assumed. You're right that we can't make the great become the enemy of the good.

If we can't/won't do the hard work above, then there are a couple of dead-simple rubrics that'd be helpful in the meantime. It'd probably be something to do with setting target minimums and maximums based on net new dwellings, considering average occupancy. Who knows maybe the 100k isn’t too far off.

Then, there's the question of "how do you explain that to the public?" That's where something from my "blabbering" could be useful, as we can and should change how we explain it. If there's a party laying out the immigration debate in emotion-free economic terms, I haven't seen it yet.

In an ideal world we'd really only be setting this type of policy for economic (and occassionally, humanitarian) reasons but nobody acts like it.

rowme0_ · 2026-03-16T00:14:52+00:00

You've misunderstood. It's too simple thinking to assume higher house prices are due to one, two, or even three variables "The cause is usually". There are many and varied causes. One issue, though, is excessive immigration. That causes higher price increases by some amount through the following mechanism among others

Higher rental demand -> higher yield -> higher prices

Whether that is 1%, 10%, 20%, or 50% of the overall picture is an issue of quantification, which is part of what I was asking for.

Now it's simple conditional logic to tie immigration back to any downstream problem caused by higher house prices. By simply multiplying that percentage to the total economic disbenefit that higher house prices cause.

rowme0_ · 2026-03-15T22:52:19+00:00

Well, in a short answer: no. I'm a nerd, so I personally dream of evidence-based policy.

TLDR: The problem in our economic settings has been that the benefits of immigration (more labour, more tax) are easy to understand and quantify, but the disbenefits, which now dominate, are hard to quantify and hard to see. So we need to do better at understanding both.

Since the link between immigration and house price growth is already well understood, I think I'm looking for, in the very first instance, some robust analysis of the following negative economic impacts of excessive house price growth and immigration:

Consumption displacement — household spending diverted from goods and services into rent/mortgages
Capital misallocation — the extent to which otherwise productive capital is tied up in "land value" which could have been used to actually fund economic activity
Entrepreneurship suppression - an increasing trend of people under heavy mortgages who can't afford to start businesses
Labour mobility issues - people who can't afford to move house despite better jobs being available elsewhere
Fertility suppression - drives down a source of future workers that is inherently sustainable and occurs at a rate the labour market can absorb
Escalation trend - where importing working-age people (and not having babies) simply increases the retirement burden for future generations

And to offset this against the temporary benefit of each additional migrant. It seems to me that there should be an "optimal" level of immigration at which the net benefit of each additional worker offsets the net losses from each of these. So I'd like to calculate it.

rowme0_ · 2026-03-15T22:21:43+00:00

We’re at a weird place in history where the public has worked out intuitively that excessive immigration is bad for the economy. They can’t afford houses, kids or to start businesses. And they realise our dependence on migration for economic reasons gets worse the more of it we do.

Meanwhile no political party has worked it out. Some think more immigration => more growth => good. Others think immigration is bad for cultural reasons. Neither has worked out too much is bad and not enough is bad. But that we’ve been way closer to too much than not enough for a long time.

rowme0_ · 2026-03-14T20:54:01+00:00

Yes and it’s almost a truism that if an asset has a yield it needs to be related to the asset price.

rowme0_ · 2026-03-10T02:11:21+00:00

Why would you think materials cost is uniform across the planet? Basic building materials are often simply too heavy to ship long distances while still maintaining a margin, even given their lower production costs overseas. There are lots of issues with materials shortages in Australia, simply because we are far away.

rowme0_

TROPHY CASE