Cameron Kusher

I’ve spent 25 years researching and commenting on the Australian residential property market, working with some of the sector’s biggest names. Now, I’m offering my expertise directly to businesses and individuals through Kusher Consulting. 1/

@DrCameronMurray If there are changes to CGT and NG presumably yields are going to be a much more important part of property investing too

Interesting to see Brisbane residential property yields so compressed. Signals overvaluation relative to Syd and Melb.

It’s interesting how this story is framed. Low growth, yield focussed investors are better off those with gains well above inflation worse off. You’ve still made a massive capital gain you are just having to pay more tax because we are rightly adjusting for inflation. afr.com/wealth/persona…

It’d be good if teams in the @NRL could defend anymore. This six-again V’Lando-ball stuff is such rubbish, it’s barely footy anymore.

@BenPhillips_ANU @urbanizationist So much more you could be asking people at the same time

@cmkusher @urbanizationist The LFS is under-utilised imo

I tell you what, it would be really good to have actual data on this from the ABS on a regular basis, at least more regularly than the Census. Perhaps a regular survey would be a great idea, it'd be terrible if you had one that just keeps getting scrapped. afr.com/policy/economy…

@urbanizationist @BenPhillips_ANU If you can get a representative survey of the labour force every month why can’t we get a survey of housing every year or two?

@cmkusher @BenPhillips_ANU It is ridiculous that we don't have frequent and regular large sample housing tenure data collection. The Census is regular but infrequent and the Survey of Income and Housing hasn't been collected since 2020. There needs to be a question in one of the administrative datasets.

Housing construction costs are on the up again With the release of the Producer Price Index for the March quarter today we get a look at what is happening with housing construction input and output prices and it's more bad news. Keep in mind this data is for the quarter and won't fully reflect the impact of the war in the Middle East. Housing construction input and output prices are rising with growth accelerating. Now we're not talking about rises like those during the pandemic but with prices already so much higher an acceleration in prices from here is going to be hard for developers and consumers to swallow. I suspect it will seriously harm the prospects of many new housing projects. House construction outputs (construction costs) were 1.1% higher over the March 2026 quarter and 4.1% over the year, the largest annual increase since September 2024 and over the past five years these costs are 42.2% higher. Other residential outputs (construction costs) were 1.1% higher over the quarter, 4.2% higher over the year, the largest annual increase since December 2024 and have risen by 33.2% over the past year. Housing input costs (materials) have increased by 0.6% over the quarter and 2.5% over the past year, the fastest growth since September 2023 and have increased by 34.9% over the past five years. I can't see how developers can swallow further increases in these costs and with weakness in established housing prices, I can't see how consumers will continue to be willing to pay higher prices for new properties. Something has got to give and what it is likely to mean is fewer new homes and a larger miss of the federal government's Housing Accord target.

Growth in key Aussie asset prices trend together.

Home value growth continues to slow and I expect this will continue. The latest data from @cotality_au shows that national home values rose by just 0.3% in April, their slowest monthly rate of growth since January 2026. Home values are still up a robust 9.8% over the past year but there are now clear signs of growth slowing across the board. With interest rates having risen twice this year and another increase likely next week, with potentially more to come, it seems market confidence has taken a hit. Lower borrowing capacities, a high level of unaffordability, ongoing high inflation and low consumer sentiment appear to be weighing on the market. It’s hard to see how over the short-term any of these factors change and I think the slowdown in the market we’re seeing right now, with falls in Sydney and Melbourne, are likely to continue over the coming months. Home values are still generally much higher over the past 5 and 10 years and most households will be able to manage a slowing and/or moderate falls in home values. What some may not be able to handle as well is higher interest rates and higher interest rates for longer as inflation persists. Next week @SQMResearch will publish their listings data for April 2026 and it will be very telling. Sydney and Melbourne have consistently has a high volume of stock for sale so it isn't a surprise that they are seeing weaker conditions. What I will be looking for are signs of stock levels starting to mount in cities like Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth where listings have been historically low. I expect listings in these cities will still be low for some time and that will lead to values continuing to rise, albeit at a slower pace but a rise in total listing could exacerbate any slowing in these markets. Interesting times ahead for the housing market.

It would be good if these institutions could be free from politics but governments (Labor and Coalition) just won't let that happen. Have a look at the first sentence of the second paragraph of the the Executive Summary In NHSAC's Report out today.

@AvidCommentator The Feds should be able to do it at a state level and then point to the states and say they are failing. That’s how politics works right, blame everyone else but yourself?

@cmkusher A government agency wont touch it mate. It would be concretely quantifying failure. Even though reading between the lines its clear household formation is being crushed, even as the proportion of single person households surges.

The National Housing Supply and Affordability Council has published their State of the Housing System Report today. While there is a lot of detail in the report, it doesn't (from what I can find correct me if I have missed it) have an estimate of the current undersupply of housing nationally. If we're going to go to all the trouble of calling a housing crisis and publishing a report each year, I think it would be reasonable to state what they believe the current under-supply of housing is nationally and in each state, that's where the conversation should really start from. nhsac.gov.au/sites/nhsac.go…

Housing credit growth continues to accelerate The RBA has published the latest financial aggregates fata for March 2026 today. The March data takes in two 25 basis-point increases to the cash rate by the RBA however, the second increase occurred 18 March so it probably didn't impact on these results too much. March was the first full month of the war in the Middle East but it doesn't seem to have much of an impact on credit growth for housing. Total outstanding housing credit was +0.6% over the month and +7.3% year-on-year, its largest annual rise since September 2022. Owner-occupier housing credit was +0.6% over the month and +6.2% year-on-year, its largest annual rise since February 2022. Investor housing credit was +0.8% over the month and +9.6% over the year, its largest annual rise since September 2015.

@pagdavidson Would be good to know that.

What’s the median age for *new* migrants?

@DrChrisCaton Highest median ages of migrants are Latvia (80.4), Greece (77.1), Malta (75.4), Italy (73.9) and Netherlands (73.1) lowest median ages are Qatar (14.6), Cayman Islands (18.2), UAE (19.9), Chad (22.4) and Oman (24.9).

@DrChrisCaton I mean you have a lot of Europeans that moved here post-WWII that are probably dying off. Unfortunate the table doesn’t have it but would love to see the median age of Greek-born, Italian-born etc I suspect it is very high. Even English-born have a very high median age.

Nepal is the only country of birth shown that has a lower median age in 2025 than the median age of Australian-born population. The median age of the Australian-born population is 35.0 years compared to 43.0 years for overseas-born.

Even though CPI wasn’t quite as bad as expected, the target is 2.5% if the RBA isn’t hiking next meeting they aren’t really serious about getting inflation back to their target (I am a mortgage holder and would prefer they didn’t hike to be totally clear on the matter).

We've added a little bit less than the population of the ACT over the past year but have we built another ACT's worth of housing and infrastructure to cater to that growth? ozpropertyinsights.substack.com/p/weve-added-a…