Hello and welcome to The Australian's Money Puzzle podcast. I'm Stuart Williams Citty in for usual host James Kirby. I'm a property friendly financial advisor and host of my own podcast, Investoperly. The daily news is always full of commentary about the direction of property prices. This includes commentary about interest rates, population growth, unemployment, lending volumes, and the list goes on.
Everyone's got an opinion to share. Of course, what I'd like to get to the bottom of today is what economic indicators should long term property investors focus on. Now I've been following property really closely for more than two decades, So what I'm going to do is I'm going to share which elements I think a key to sort of focus on, and then I'm going to invite my guests today to not only share his thoughts but also critique what I've outlined. So he goes of course, we start
with overall economic health. I think it's super important because that gives us the backdrop for property prices to potentially grow. Things like the unemployment rate, GDP growth, population growth and so on. But let's be real, Australia hasn't had a recession for more than three decades, so we might take that one for granted. And then there's three other factors that I think are really important to focus on. The
first one is interstate migration. Now, overseas immigration tends to be relatively stable in terms of where it goes, which states it goes to. However, interstate migration can be a really good proxy for property owner sentiment. So good example of this was that interstate migration was negative in Perth for a long time and in around twenty twenty and twenty one it started to turn positive and we know what's happened to property price growth since same with Brisbane
about twenty seventeen eighteen, same thing happened there. The next one is interstates and lending policy. But I think lending policy is more important than interst rate settings. Eighty percent of property in Australia is bought with a mortgage, and lending policy tells us which buyers will be most active and where. And lastly, housing supply. Now, of course it's really tough to change dramatically change housing supply in any
particular location, and it's very expensive to do so. So if we're investing in established locations, really all were worried about then is change in density, and that can come down to housing apartment supply and then planning restrictions. Of course, I'm not an economist, so I invited the perfect guest on today's show to tell you if I'm crazy or not. He's worked at Macquarie Bank, Federal Treasury, the OECD. He's the chief economist at Australian ETF Behemoth Beta Shares. He's
been on the show previously. Welcome back, David Massinese.
Great to be with the Stuart and yeah, I'm looking forward to the discussion today.
Excellent Dave. Let's start with the big picture. Then. If I'm planning to invest in property in an established suburb been a major capital city, what do you think of the two or three most important macroeconomic factors that I need to pay attention to.
Well, I mean I think you have coven them. I mean in terms of interest rates, the economy. I mean, look, and you can summarize all of this into housing affordability. I mean, their various economists out there have these measures. I have one myself, and you can actually sort of
broad the estimate. I'm talking nationally here. You know how high house prices are relative to income given the prevailing level of interest rates, and when that gets to a very high level, when affordability generally is very poor, then it's hard for house prices to grow strongly. And you know, after a major boom and house prices they tend to get expensive and you think, you know, from a macro national wide perspective, at least you're going to be struggling
to get further strong gain. So that's like anything, you know, buying at the right time of the cycle, buying when house prices are relatively cheap is going to give you a better return at least in the shorter Depending on
your time period obviously matters less. If it's a long term holding over thirty forty years and you're just getting set forever, but interest rates the economy, then I guess at the particular suburb, the yeah, economic prospects in that suburb supply probably even more important because people can move around in terms of where they work.
But what is important is how many.
Houses or how many units are able to be built in that suburb. And that's where it does get a
little bit funny, because people want housing affordability. People you know, at the moment, the political discussion is all about improving housing affordability, and one way to do that is to improve supply, to improve the density how many houses we can cram into a certain area, which is great if you want to get into the market, not so great if you're looking to move into that suburb and invest and then worry about, you know, all the influx of supply,
because that will depress your return going forward. You know, it really depends whether you're a buyer or seller in that reg are.
And of course we see property markets behaving quite differently across Australia. You've got Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide that recorded double digit property growth, Sydney about five percent and Melbourne sort of slightly in decline. But of course we have the same interest rate settings. You know that they're obviously federal. What do you think is driving the disparity and growth between those markets?
Firstly, the affordability. I mean, when Sydney and Melbourne, for example, particularly Sydney gets very expensive relative to other capital cities, you tend to see you know, some people leaving Sydney, selling up and moving to cheap, cheaper cities. You see investors looking for better value elsewhere, so you tend to get us sort of re equival, you know, realignment of valuations if they get too far out of line. So there is that general cycle, but also also depends on
what is driving the economy at the time. For example, if we're in a major mining boom, as we were a decade or so ago, but he's went through the roof.
You know, everybody wanted to move to Perth to be part of the mining boom, and there was a brief period I think is around twenty sixteen where the median price of a Perth property was higher than in Sydney, and then Sydney, you know, Perth the mining boom ended and Perth went through you know, years of slumber where the where afford house prices went nowhere for a while and valuation, you know, relative value.
Had to be restored in that market.
So there are state differences in economic performance depending on what sectors are driving growth at the time, what mining boom being one, Tourism is another one. So when tourism is strong, it tends to favor the New South Wales the East Coast markets relative to the other markets. I actually come from Adelaide, originally. So I'm a little bit familiar with the Adelaide market, and Adelaide has gone nowhere
for a long time. Adelaide is one of those markets where there is supply ample well I wouldn't say ample, but greater supply capacity as they moved, you know, built out into the suburbs. And so that's tended to hold back prices for a while. And also, people you know, generally leave Adelaide, so they don't get a lot of internal international migration. And many people you know have tended
to leave Adelaide to see work opportunities elsewhere. So it hasn't had the population growth to drive prices for a while. But you know, if it's got cheap enough that people have come back or at least not have left. And it's going through a bit of a you know, a renaissance at the moment.
Yeah, not so cheap anymore. But if you talk about relative value to Sydney, Melbourne's never been cheaper relative to relative to Sydney. Do you think Melbourne's do for a bit of a resurgence, and if so, what do you think might be the impetus for that sort of to change in price direction?
Yeah, Look, again, Look, another thing we haven't mentioned, another variable into the mix, if you like, is government policy. And you know, I think in Melbourne's case, you know, they did impose you know, more costs and taxation on investors in Melbourne, and that's tended to hurt the property market relative to other other areas. Melbourne obviously was hurt pretty well. It had a bigger period of lockdown, a bigger shock due to COVID, and I think Melbourne is
slowly recovering from. You know, for a while there Melbourne was booming relative to Sydney, and the medium price in Melbourne almost got as high as Sydney.
But then you know, covids come along.
There's been some changes in government policy and it's sort of you know, a you know taken a you know, relatively speaking, has softened up.
Yeah, it's a good seguay to talk about sort of property forecasting because you know, we just think back to that sort of COVID period that all the major banks were forecasting a twenty percent drop in prices and our friend Christopher Joy jumped on that bandwagon as well.
With that, he's.
Sort of forecast around property price changes. Now, my view around this is the behavioral economic side of things haven't been really. I mean, you can build a model around property prices, but it doesn't factor in the behavioral economic factors. And of course two thirds of property buyers are own occupiers, and own occupiers will go to great links to obviously not have to sell their home. So for a twenty percent price drop, we've got to see probably more sellers
than there are buyers. And how's that going to occur? So do you have a view on this in terms of property forecasts and how difficult I guess it is to forecast property prices in the shorter term.
Well, I mean, I think property forecast in turn come down to economic forecasts, and I think a lot of the forecast for those big house price to clients during COVID is that we thought we would go into a wrenching recession. You know, we were facing lockdowns, were facing many people losing their jobs, and I guess the concern was that people would lose their jobs and be forced to sell their homes. But what we saw two things happened.
A we didn't get the big increase in unemployment. We did get an increase for a while, but many people were kept in their jobs through the work Support program from the federal government. And also importantly we kind of had a Team Australia. You know, it was being called Team Australia if anyone remembers that term, where every sort
of pitched in and helped each other out. And banks, I think we're under a moral pressure, I think not to force people into selling their home, even if they were struggling due to COVID.
It was a combination of things.
Unemployment didn't go as high as we feared, and those that did lose their jobs were given support from the government, and banks didn't foreclose on properties to the extent that many feared as well.
We got through that period.
Look, house prices did decline, I think nationally in Sydney at least they were down ten percent or so at one point, even with the RBA cutting interest rates. But thereafter the economy stabilized and then obviously the immigration and one of the factors there is immigration dried up, so that source of demand went away. But then obviously with COVID recovering and we reopened the borders and immigration surged back. Interest rates were for a time very low, so affordability
was looking good and house prices recovered. So just to summarize, really, I think I guess the overly pessimistic housing forecasts during COVID really came down to an overly pessimistic view of the economy and the economy. Actually, you know, we got through that better than feared because of a government support and b you know, banks bank banks holding back from forcing full clothes. You know, people were able to renegotiate their loans for time and these sort of things.
Yeah, they're even offering interest only periods for people struggling with three payments and so forth, So that you're right, probably more useful for long term invest is longer term forecasts. Of course they're not very newsworthy because they're probably pretty boring. But if you were to forecast property prices, you know, longer term, say over a decade period, would it be true to say that you'd probably focus on more of those macro economic fundamentals rather than the sort of geographical
market factors. So it's really I guess forming a view around the economic health of Australia.
Yeah, look at it depends on how detailed you want to get, Like at a macro level, you know, the key drives of house prices are affordability, and the end of the day, house prices can't rise by more that assuming interest rates don't change, assuming they stay the same
over the next twenty years. As an example, house prices can't rise more than household income because you reach a certain point where you know you can't afford to buy a house because the income you need to devote to pay the mortgage is beyond people's capacity, and on average, it's something like if you look at national affordability measures, something like thirty on average, something like thirty percent if of after tax family income devoted to a mortgage is sort of where.
The limits are.
Once you get way beyond that, house prices get too expensive, and below that they get affordable. So the constraint ultimately is growth in the economy, growth in incomes, which is something like probably five percent a year. You know, over the long run, now we've had up until last few years, we have had a period, you know, two decades.
Of a trend decline in interest rates.
This is where you know, many investors have got to be careful because that's not going to be repeated. You know, we had double digit interest rates in the late nineteen eighties, back when we had high inflation, and the interest rates have basically been trending down for you know, two decades, which meant that you know, house prices could rise faster than household income. But that's something that can't be repeated. Your house interest rates aren't going to continue to trend
lower because they're already you know, relatively low. Another example of you know, past performance is not an indicator of future performance there, but I think you know, a reasonable expectation is that broadly speaking, you know, house prices are going to match growth in nationally growth in household incomes, which is going to be something like you know, wages growth and I think four to five percent on average. Now, if you want to dig deeper, then you can look
at booming areas. You know, one of the big questions in Australia have been the tree change or the well there's things going on, people moving to cheaper regional areas as they retire. We've it's seen booming regional areas, but also generally a move from you know, rural to urban that has been a trends. You know, urban property has generally done better than regional property generally speaking. Because of that movement of people away from the bush towards the cities. Now,
can that be reversed. Maybe that can be reversed with government policy. It's certainly cheaper to live outside of the major capital cities, but at the moment this is where all the jobs and the activity is, and that's why there's been that trend towards the major capital cities rather than the regional areas.
Yeah, I've spoken a lot about trying to invest in locations that aren't necessarily tied to household income, that there is other sources of wealth to sort of fuel property price growth. Anyway, that's really interesting. We're going to take a short break and when we come back, I'm going to ask Dave about housing supply and demand with you in a moment. Hello, Welcome back to The Australian's Money Puzzle podcast. I'm Stuart Williams and I'm talking to David Bassanese,
chief economist of Beata Shares. Dave, let's talk about housing supply now, because obviously we can talk about demand, which talked about housing affordability is a sort of big driver I guess of demand. But if we talk about supply, of course the Australian government's had an ambitious target of a million more homes over the next five years. How successful do you think the government's going to be around
housing supply? And I'll say that, you know, over the last twenty years, almost every single year I've read a report to say that concludes Australia's not building enough houses. We're got a supply shortage. However, you don't see too many homeless people, and you know the I mean there's a bit of a rental crisis going on in terms
of occupancy, but that's driven by something different. So I'm really interested to know how much weight should we be putting on these sort of projections and what do you think How sensitive is housing supply to government policy?
Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there.
Look, I think to think about the housing market, there's two times. I mean in Australia, it is true that supply is relatively constrained. I mean, if you think about Sydney, I mean, you can't build further out to our east in Sydney because it's right on the coast right half, you know, there's water, and then you can only build out west and then you hit the ranges and the hills, so we are sort of constrained, and so within that area, you know, it comes down to, you know, can you
build high rise apartment blocks to increase supply. But there's been a lot of you know, I guess nimbiism in that sense that there's been a you know and quote.
You know, I'm not against that.
I mean, if you live in a nice traditional suburb and you've got single story homes, you know, you don't want twenty story tower blocks being left right and center. So I'm certainly sympathetic to that. The problem in Australia, just to take it to its basic point, is that
we're very urbanized. You know, we talk about Australia being a large country and a small population, but all of our population is squeezed along the East coast and you know, the handful of major cities along the coast and the rest of the country is pretty barren, so we squit even though so we are very urbanized, very high proportion of our population live in very urban areas. Plus we have low, you know, sort of regulations against high rise
apartment blocks. So if you go to South Korea, for example, flying to Soul, you'll see high rise apartment blocks as far as the eye can see. That's how everybody lives and that's why they can have you know, millions of people living in a city and it's affordable. So do we want to be like that? Maybe not?
So what is the solution.
The solution is either you know, you either build up and have people living in the cities, or you build out and live them, let them live in the out of suburbs or the regions, but have very good transport networks into where the jobs are in the cities, which we haven't really done very well. Or we put the you know, encouraged jobs in the regions. You know, so there are various ways, but we've never really done either of those successfully.
So at the end of the day, all.
The jobs, all the activity is in this capital cities, so people want to live near those capital cities. But we still have the development constraints against high rise apartment blocks as far as the eye can see. So land becomes a premium, the price of land becomes a premium.
That's why house prices in Australia are relatively high as a multiple of income compared to many other countries such as the United States, And you know, we can talk about tech, we can talk about things so that you know, a whole bunch of people, you know, a whole bunch of arguments. For white house prices are high in Australia relative to other countries, but that is a basically it It's not it's you know, taxation, capital gains, negative gearing.
All of these things I think are sort of side issue used to the big issue of high urbanization.
That's our choice.
But at the same time, then reluctance to become a sort of South Korea in terms of high rise apartment blocks.
I mean, Victoria has a great reputation for building infrastructure below budget and on time. Of course I say that tongue in cheek, so I agree. It's not something that's going to be easy to solve. You need to be able to, you know, if you're going to leave one hundred k's away from a major capital city, if that's really serviced really well, like it might be in other countries in Western Europe and Japan and so forth, it can work. But you're right, everyone needs to flock to
the city. Do you think either of those things are going to change infrastructure or density, you know, over the next couple of decades or do you think you know it'll just be more of the same, Because I'm asking the question because if I'm an investor and I'm thinking, well, property price is how you know? It's a common question I get asked, how long can property prices continue to grow at the pace they have over the last two
or three decades. Mathematically prices just become unaffordable. But if you're investing in an area that's highly desirable, you know that only the top twenty percent of the population can afford to live in, well, then that price growth doesn't isn't necessary linked to household income. So do you think that the problem will be solved? Because if it isn't, then investing in the eastern suburbs in Sydney is still a great idea.
Look fundamentally, I don't think that.
I think Australian housing is always going to be at the again where if you've got just to think about economics one I want for a moment and think about markets. If you have a supply constrained market, the price of a product in that market is going to be based on affordability. When there's a scarcity, people will pay up to what they can afford to pay. And that's sort of the way that the Australian market works at the moment.
People pay as much. You know, again, you get five people turning up an auction, they're going to bid against each other and they'll pay it up to the last dollar that they can afford to pay. And that old only is what is constraining the house price. But it will go to that dollar, and going forward it's always going to be given the supply constraints at that uncomfortable affordable level for certainly people trying to get into the market.
I don't think that's going.
To you know, it could change, but I look the other side of it is, on the one hand, governments like to talk about housing affordability. On the other hand, they don't want to see house prices crash either, you know, they don't want to have too much supply that house price is weak. And I mean I think John Howard, ex Prime Minister, famously said a few years ago, you know, no one's ever to complain to him about their house price rising. There's two sides of the coin here in
terms of how this is dealt. My eye would I like to I personally would like to see more focus on encouraging regional development, encouraging people to be able to live out in country towns and maybe telecommute. That's the way of the future without needing to, you know, turn
nice inner city suburbs into high rise apartment wastelands. I'd like to preserve, preserve what we have in the inner cities and try to encourage some greater regional development and allow people not to have to cram into the cities. But whether they do that, what we don't want to do. You know what politicians do, you know, coming up to an election, is they throw more money. You know, economists hate this when they throw subsidies. You know, here's another first home buyers subsidy.
And we know what happens.
All that does is all the first home buyers turn up the auction and bid away that to the seller. So the only person that benefits of the person selling the house. And it's very frustrating. So those supply those demand side sort of demand side affordability measures in a supply constrained market don't work because all they do is benefit the seller.
Yeah, one hundred percent. If we talk about the sort of demand side, the affordability side. Some data that really struck me more recently was released by CBA in its results announcement a few weeks or months ago, and they reported that seventy five percent of borrowers that are borrowing for investment purposes had a household income of more than two hundred thousand. I think that was twenty four percent had a household income of more than five hundred thousand.
So really it is you know, if you don't have a high income, because of the three percent interest rate buffer that they use to test serviceability, you really just can't participate. And of course that just fuels wealth inequality. Doesn't know, I mean, you know, people with middle to lower income owners sort of get locked out of the market. Now, APRA, the banking regulator, will argue that, you know, that's just crudential regulation. We want to have a healthy banking system
and so forth. But what should investors take away from that, Like, what are the long term implications of you know, the settings been so restrictive for people on middle incomes that they're not able to get into the property market or take that next step up the ladder.
Look so in terms of I mean, one of the issues in Australia at the moment, of course, is that if you're a high income earner, you know, your marginal tax rate is fifty percent, right, if you run a company, you know a company, the tax rate is in twenty five percent, So there's this massive gap. And also you know, you get at capital gains tax discount if you own
a property. So one of the issues going on at the moment is that widening gap between the corporate tax rate and the high ink and the high marginal tax rate for people on high income paye income earners is encouraging, yeah, at the margin more property investment. So more and more high income earners that are facing a high marginal tax rate are encouraged to try to you know, reduce that
tax burden through investing in property through negative gearing. Now, funnily enough, if we were able to change the policy so that the marginal tax rate wasn't fifty percent, it was maybe thirty percent or something, the incentive to negatively gearing a property would actually be less.
I think that's one point.
And you know, what we've seen over the years is that more more people are now being pushed in that top income tax bracket, you know, in it. Maybe many people don't know this. In the United States or Europe, to be in the top tax bracket, you need to have your income needs to be like five six times the average income.
In Australia it's two.
The top tax bracket in Australia cuts in at a relatively low level anyway, So that's just one of the one of the extra things that I think driving the market. So in terms of proper investing, Yeah, you are going to get those on higher incomes that are more eagerly chasing those properties because they have this tax burden that they're trying to deal with.
Yeah, that's really good. We're going to take another break and when we come back, I'm going to answer question from Sam and also take the opportunity to ask Dave about direction of interst rates. Back with you in a moment. Hello, and welcome back to The Australian's Money Puzzle podcast. I'm still we so I'm talking to David Bassanese, the chief
economist at Beata Shares. Now, before before we get into our listener question, Dave, I wanted to ask you about I couldn't help asking you about the direction of interest rates and I was interested to see that both Kolabar Capital and Research Affiliates has done some work on what happens when inflation rises significantly, and they're both concluded that quite often, more than seventy percent of the time, inflation
will initially come back and then it will reexalerate. And according to the RBA's own forecasts, inflation won't hit the middle of the two to three percent ban until the start of twenty twenty six. So if the risk that inflation becomes entrenched or the inflation re exalerates, why wouldn't the RBA hike interest rates now again to reduce that risk if its own forecasts tell us that it won't be in the middle point of the band for maybe fifteen or so months.
Yeah.
Look, firstly, just on the idea that inflation re accelerates, I mean, one of the examples many people use that they look at the nineteen seventies. You know, we had inflation go up in the early seventies, it did come back, and then it bounced back in the late seventies early eighties.
Now we had two oil price shocks, we'd opeck one in the early seventies where aill prices you know, surged and then they came back, and then we'd hope, you know, the oil price shock number two, so that you know, I think that's one of the I'm not convinced that there's necessarily this cycle that high inflation comes down and then it bounces back. I mean, I'm not convinced that
is a given. And certainly in today's world of you know, high globalization, a lot of tech technology disruption, I think inflation is just generally going to tend to be lower for longer. I think COVID was a special case where we had massive supply and demand disruptions which initially caused shortages and caused prices to go up to clear markets. But prices have been coming down and I think they will continue to come down now. Just in terms of the RBA, I mean, the RBA has got a balancing act.
You are absolutely correct in that the longer the thing about, the longer inflation stays high, the greater the risk that it gets entrenched into wage and price stting behavior. We saw that in the nineteen seventies and then it did take wrenching recessions in the early eighties to actually, you know, finally break the back of that inflation. So that is the challenge. You can't wait forever for inflation to come
back down again. But at the same time is you know, if you can get inflation into the target ban in the next six months, how do you do that smack raise rates and cause the recession. So you've got to find a middle ground somewhere there, and that's where central banks around the world, including the RBA, have been, you know, trying to find that middle ground. So the RBA's judgment at the moment is and I think correct inflation is coming down. I think various measures of underlying inflation now
around about four percent. A year or so ago they are over six percent, So it's come down and I think continuing to come down back toward that percent. And if you look at surveys of long term inflation expectations, they are.
Still relatively well contained.
So provided the RBA thinks that inflation expectations are contained, provided it thinks that what we're seeing isn't beencoming embedded into wage and pricending behavior, then they can afford to wait a little bit and not smash the economy. Some people say, oh, we can't take that risk, Well, you know, it's worth taking the risk if it avoids a wrenching recession where hundreds of thousands of people lose their job in my mind, and that's the sort of judgment we're
taking at the moment. And again I go back to I think that due to globalization, due to competition in markets being a lot tougher than it was ten twenty thirty years ago, the natural tendency is for inflation to ease, and I think we will see that over the next year or so.
And money markets are pricing in about a one percent drop of the course of the twenty five calendar year. Do you think that seems reasonable? Do you think the money markets are right in terms of prising that.
In yes, I do.
I've got the RBA cutting rates in February of twenty five, and I think we're going to see we need to see inflation continuing to come down bottom l At the moment, inflation is still too high. So the underlying measure of inflation in Australia, it's called the trim mean. For example, the year on year rate is three point eight percent now by early next year, and that's the June quarter measure.
We get two more quarterly CPI reports the September quarter, the December quarter, we get the December quarter one in late January of twenty five. If that annual rate is down to three and a half or even a bit below three and a half, I think that's enough of progress on inflation for the RBA to at least start to take the foot off the break. I mean, interest rates are restrictive levels in Australia, and so it's not about you know, stimulating the economy. It's just taking the
foot off the break a little bit. And as inflation continues to progressively come down, I think they'll then be able to, you know, what we call RIP normalized rates is bring them back to a more normal level, which is closer to three percent than the four point three to five that we have at the moment.
Yeah, excellent. We're going to take a listener question now from Cray. Craig Rights. My wife and my wife and I are in our early thirties, currently expats in the US with the intention to return to Australia in the coming years. I'm thinking it might be a good time in our lives to engage a financial planner for the first time to help setting things up in terms of asset allocation now as we have a host of new
complexities to think about. My question is do people engage financial planners for this sort of one off piece of advice to set the strategy in the right place. Any other insights you may have on the topic for typical
fees charged would be much appreciated. So Craig James had Jackie Clark on the show back in the start of September, the fifth of September, and they talked about how financial advisor numbers in Australia of half over the last five ish years, so there's a sort of shortage of supply of financial advisors if you like, and that most advisors only work with ongoing clients just because of resourcing issues really, and that the average fee starts based on their research
they talked about in that podcast episode, around five thousand dollars a years. Look, I think it's probably worth while. There are some unique complexities to expats returning to Australia, and property is a big element as well. That is typically win to buy the family home if you don't already have it, and how much to spend and how to make that not only a good lifestyle decision, but also ultimately a good financial one as well, So I think there's probably value in making sure that you execute
on those things correctly and not make any mistakes. What could be challenging, however, is to firstly find an advisor that has both that property and shares and super expertise, but then also most importantly, finding is that's going to give you that one off advice. Do you have anything to add, Dave.
No, I think that's pretty pretty sensible.
I mean, if you can afford the financial advice, you know, certainly it's always a good idea. I think financial advice, you know, really does pay for itself. If certainly, if you've got a lot of assets and you can afford to get the advice, it certainly makes sense. And as I said, I think it doesn't necessarily, and the idea of even just a one off you know, you get taking stock of the situation as you come back, is good. I mean, they might offer you a more ongoing service.
It's really up to you whether you want to go down that path as well. But yeah, certainly, if you can afford advice, it's usually I think it's certainly well worth the investment.
Yeah.
One of my mentors have told has told me many times to it. Professional advice pays for itself, you know, whether it's legal advice, financial advice, whatever it might be. Dave, that's been a really interesting discussion. I'm sure our listeners
have really enjoyed it as well. I mean, there is, as I said in the introduction, a lot of information for past some predictions and opinions out there with respect to economic settings and property price growth, and I think that helps our listeners really understand and put a bit of context around it. Just a reminder, folks, if you have any questions or feedback, would love to hear from you. The email is the Money Puzzle at the Australian dot
com dot au. Please keep those questions coming. James Girard will be back with you on Thursday, and I'm sure you'll be relieved to know that James Kirby will be back in this seat this time next week. I really hope you've enjoyed today's episode. Thanks very much, Dave.
Now always great to be with you all.
Thanks for having us buffin out