Current Market Insights
The Current Market Insights Podcast is brought to you by Harris Partners Real Estate.
Understanding the property market can be a challenging thing, with highs and lows, twists and turns. The media and agents tend to spread the news they want you to hear, with the advice they want you to follow.
Current Market Insights is an unbiased look into what is happening, what tips you can use to buy, sell, or rent, and that you wont find anywhere else.
Current Market Insights
Episode 87: ACCC Targets REA Group — Market Power, Price Hikes & Shifting Listing Trends
In this episode, we examine the ACCC’s investigation into REA Group and whether Australia’s leading real estate portal is misusing its market dominance. With vendors and agents under pressure from rising listing costs, we unpack the economics behind online advertising, growing use of off-market listings, and how competition (or lack of it) is shaping vendor behaviour.
We also touch on:
- The price disparity between Balmain and Mount Druitt listings
- Domain’s recent $3 billion acquisition by CoStar
- The May rate cut’s effect on auction clearances, now just above 50%
- Rising inflation figures and how they might influence the RBA’s next move
As mentioned in this episode, listen to our previous discussion around REA market dominance here.
As always if there is a specific topic you would like for us to cover, please reach out and let us know!
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Speaker 2:Welcome to the Current Market Insights podcast brought to you by Harris Partners Real Estate. Each episode we chat with real estate author and industry leader, peter O'Malley, to discuss the current property market conditions and provide insights to assist you on your property journey.
Speaker 3:Hello and welcome to another edition of Current Market Insights. I'm your host, kieran O'Brien, and with me, as always, is Mr Peter O'Malley. Peter, hello, kieran O'Brien, great to see you. Peter O'Malley, always great to see you.
Speaker 3:I would love to kick off tonight's episode by talking about a friend of yours, a friend of mine.
Speaker 3:That's realestatecomau, better known as the REA group on the ASX and REA, much like Domain for those listening who aren't necessarily aware one of the major players, if not the major player, in the Australian property landscape in terms of listings and the website that showcases all the properties that are for sale.
Speaker 3:There has been an article come out this week talking about REA and how, in fact, they're now entangled with the ACCC, the consumer watchdog, around some unjust or potentially unjust practices and particularly price gouging. I would love to start tonight's discussion firstly, peter, by, I guess, getting your thoughts and insight into this story a little bit about what actually is the kind of allegation here. And then, what are your thoughts, particularly given that you have been in the industry so long that you would have seen the evolution of REA, you would have seen the evolution of allegation here. And then, what are your thoughts, particularly given that you have been in the industry so long that you would have seen the evolution of REA. You would have seen the evolution of the landscape. How does the kind of article and what it talks about line up with your experience and understanding of the space?
Speaker 1:Yeah, thanks, kieran. Well, look you know. Quoting the media Australian Financial Review, they wrote yesterday Australia's competition watchdog is in the early stages of a probe into the REA group, looking at whether the News Corp-controlled real estate listings giant has been misusing its market dominance to hike rates unreasonably. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has been quietly meeting with real estate agents and industry bodies over the past few weeks asking whether they have feedback or issues with the $34 billion ASX listed company. So a bit of a quick history lesson. In about 2002, kieran realestatecom was going broke, running at 40 cents a share. Fast forward 21 years later and their share price is over $250 a share. So from 40 cents to $250 a share, it's actually 242.18.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It dropped 3.5% after the probe was announced. Sorry, yes, it's a bit of a collapse.
Speaker 1:So, yes, when I looked at the share price last, that was around the time of the announcement and that hadn't sort of leaked through. So yeah, it was sitting above $250 a share. It was sitting above $250 a share. So $34 billion behemoth that started in a garage in Melbourne and that has come from real estate agents having the price jacked up on them annually, without fail, essentially for over 20 years. Without fail, essentially for over 20 years. The only times that the realestatecom that I can remember did not hit the real estate industry with a savage annual price increase, in fairness to them, was during the 2008 global financial crisis and during COVID.
Speaker 3:Oh, they're very kind. That is kind Well look from realestatecom's perspective.
Speaker 1:if you increase prices and the customers pay it, that's fair terms of business, Because confirmation bias right. Yeah, and the reason that real estate agents have just continued to pay these price increases was a couple of reasons. The first is the legacy of print. Real estate agents were used to having vendors fund the campaign under a vendor paid advertising model back in the days of newspapers, and at that time they were asking vendors to fund a campaign. This is back in 2000, 2001.
Speaker 1:Fund a a newspaper campaign, whether it be the local inner west coria, wentworth, coria or the saturday sydney morning herald, to the tune of anywhere between eight and thirty thousand dollars yeah when I first started in real estate in 2000 as a 23-year-old in sales here in Balmain, I would regularly meet professionals that had spent $30,000 on an advertising campaign for their auction failed, not got a bid, and said, well, that's just bad luck, that's how it goes some days, that's madness, madness and I was just gobsmacked that at that point that that people had that sort of money to burn and then the internet really became dominant.
Speaker 1:it clearly existed in 2002, but people worked out by 2005, 2006, that there was absolutely no need to be advertising in newspapers anymore and, and slowly but surely, you know the big broadsheet Sydney Morning Herald shrunk and you know your domain lift-out, slowly disappeared and became down to nothing. And the Wentworth Courier in the eastern suburbs went from 500 pages to I don't even know if they print that thing anymore.
Speaker 3:I've seen it on doorsteps in Paddington. It definitely does. I don't know how often, though.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but all of these two media companies and people that produce these publications was called the rivers of gold.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then the internet took it all away and slowly but surely over the last 20 years, companies such as news limited, who own the the controlling stake in realestatecom, and Fairfax, who own Domain, and others, have sought to transfer the revenue that was lost from newspaper advertising back across to internet sales, and they've achieved that. So that is why realestatecom have got away with putting such savage price increases annually, year on year, on the real estate industry because the real estate industry were conditioned for it. It's in their DNA and they've got a mentality. 98% of the industry has a mentality. I don't really care what realestatecom charges anyway, because the vendor pays it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that may be the tipping point where the regulator has now stepped in, because realestatecom has become so powerful that you can't plausibly market a home anywhere in australia without being on realestatecom. So whether it's the agent selling the advertising to the vendor or the vendor insisting on it through realestatecom, you have to be there and the costs are extortionate. So an internet ad in Australia is probably over double, if not triple, what a real estate internet ad costs anywhere else in the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And people just line up to pay it blindly.
Speaker 3:I feel like that's a common thread perhaps just in Australian real estate in general. Everyone just kind of accepts so much about, you know, the real estate market broadly. It's overpriced, it's this, it's whatever. You know all those kind of things that go around. But you know Australians just go. Oh well, that's the way it is. You know we live in a very expensive country and you know the economy's propped up on real estate and you know the status quo is just kind of maintained.
Speaker 3:We will run through, because I've looked into the numbers for a couple of listings and ads to just get a sense of what kind of value we're talking about here. The article itself talks about how they talk with Tim McKibben who is the CEO of the Real Estate Institute in New South Wales, and he talks about how you know you can't list for any less than sort of $5,000 on realestatecomau now as a general kind of sense. And they talk about in the article that in 2009,. So only you know whatever that is, 16 years ago it was $75 to put a listing on reacom, right, so $75, everyone would have jumped aboard. As you say, you know print's phasing out, internet's taking over, so there's this mass transition and it seems so appealing. You know, it's cost effective, it's got some appeal, it's easy, it's portable, it's fast, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1:If you can believe it. On that point, as late as 2008, we were having to convince certain vendors no, you don't need to spend $1,000 on a Herald ad for Saturday morning.
Speaker 3:I'm not surprised, honestly.
Speaker 1:As you just say there, the $75 realestatecom ad. It was a bit more than that. He's got extremities there in his two examples five thousand dollars to list and seventy five dollars back, way back when it was never that cheap and it's not quite that expensive now, but but nevertheless. Um being on the internet for the entirety of the campaign in 2008 was a fraction of a thousand dollar,000 ad in the Herald, but we still had to plead with people not to waste their $1,000. And in the end it was like if you want to spend $1,000, spend $1,000.
Speaker 1:And I'd ring them up on Saturday afternoon. I'd say look, I hate to say this, we did not get one inquiry or one person mention your ad and I did that not to rub salt into the wounds, but I didn't want them ringing me the following saturday saying let's have another go. Yeah, because the, the purchasing market had clearly migrated from from the saturday morning herald or the, you know the in the inner west here, the inner west courier, to being completely online. They started domain was dominant early um and we're running at about 50 50 now between realestatecom and Domain in the inner west. The further you go into the suburbs and when you go into Queensland. Realestatecom is all dominant.
Speaker 3:Yeah, look, I'm glad you raised that point because I actually wanted to sort of switch over to that. I seem to recall years ago I grew up in, I grew up in eastern suburbs and I seem to recall that if you were doing anything in property uh, you know, I was in randwick you had to go through domain. That was kind of the. The thing it was, I think, always kind of painted in my memory anyway, is, this was the more premium prestige kind of publication and you know, if you're in domain, that was a house that would sell well and people, the right people, would pay attention and as you say now in the inner west it's maybe 50, 50. Maybe that's transitioning as well. The article here says that uh, domains market cap is now only one-tenth of reas. Now obviously that's in value as well as we. We could assume, uh, or you could maybe extrapolate that that's also talking about exposure, but I don't think it's quite that clear cut.
Speaker 1:Well, where it comes from is. The Americans have just bought Domain for $3 billion. Yes, I saw that and as discussed, based on the day this article was written, when the realestatecom share price was $258, I think it was that valued the company at $34 billion, so yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly one-tenth. I find it interesting and I think it's important to note that, if you know, rea, whilst undertaking these predatory practices, are doing so while also dominating the space and potentially convincing consumers that they don't have an alternative. You know, know, if you want to sell your property as as a vendor, then what do you do if you don't want to pay those prices?
Speaker 1:look, I didn't want to interrupt you before, but when you said as australians, we tend to just accept these things at face value. And the point that I wanted to make around that one, kieran, which is in sync with what you've just said there is, is that Australians don't quite accept it at face value. But real estate salespeople are highly effective and highly convincing and when you interview four agents over a month before deciding, one of them gets the listing and all four highly effective salespeople tell you that you've got to be on realestatecom and the rates are fair, you're likely going to go with one of them.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Now, if people want to know what solutions or alternatives the industry's coming up with to try and get their head out of the noose that they've put themselves, in well, that solution, which most people would readily recognise, is off-market listings. I said inside real estate that off-market listings is not an effective sales strategy. It's brought about by the real estate industry trying to avoid heavy website portal costs, particularly when they've got a fair idea of who the likely buyers are going to be anyway. So, as a real estate agent, there's a.
Speaker 1:there's a massive moral question going into different home sellers houses saying I need to take five thousand dollars off you to find buyers for your house, and then all of the buyers that walk through the house you know anyway yeah and are on your database, and you can let them know about the same house by sending an email which costs nothing, but instead you're sitting in a vendor's lounge room asking them for $5,000 non-refundable to send the same email through realestatecom. Yeah, or domain.
Speaker 3:Of course, or both right, because more often than not, just because REA is expensive doesn't mean domain is cheap. On the flip side, they're both expensive, rea just seem to be a little bit more aggressive. Demand is cheap. On the flip side, they're both expensive, rea just seemed to be a little bit more aggressive. To give some, I guess, some context to our listeners, as I said, I went through and had a bit of a look at some of the costs to list and advertise some of these properties and one of the things that has become apparent in the article, but also just in our experience, is that the listing cost and one of the reasons they're being investigated being investigated in fact is that the price is different depending where you list. So if they deem that your property is in a premium location, you get a premium price tag attached, which you know doesn't surprise anyone. But you know, I'm thankful that the watchdog is actually investigating this and trying to do something about it. But to put some context to that, I I just looked up very briefly. It's a list of property in Mount Druitt, so I just picked something out west You're looking at. You know, kind of baseline $300 to get it online and then another $1,700 to just kind of get it to show for people. Then if you want to do a proper ad which is the vast majority of what you know agents are trying to sell to their clients you're looking at $5,500 thousand roughly, which is a lot of money in mount. Drew it in mount, drew it right.
Speaker 3:Come to balmain, the flip side of that. You know obviously where we're recording this. You, you still have the, the same kind of base 300 but you're suddenly looking at 2300 just to get it online and visible and then to get it to the same sort of advertising space as the other one. It's over 7 000. So we're talking the same size ad, the same, you know, content, the same pictures, whatever it might be, nothing extra added. But there's, you know, about eighteen hundred dollars price difference between the two, which makes sense to us because we've been in the industry for a while. But it's absolutely absurd when you think about the reality of that because, as you say, everyone's on real estate or domain, anyway People are accessing this. Is it really necessary to spend over $7,000?
Speaker 1:just to get your pictures in front of someone. What you've outlined there is why they're being investigated for price gouging. We mustn't say they have price gouged or anything like that. They're being investigated for it.
Speaker 3:We can't dispute the discrepancies, though, that the prices are different, but we can't prejudge them either. No, no, but you can't dispute, they're different.
Speaker 1:Yeah, look, they're coming for you, not me, that's fine, because you've said all the nasty things about them.
Speaker 1:But look, you know, we could all draw our own conclusions from what you've just read out there as to what's happening and it's a real case, generally speaking, of if I can charge you more and you can afford more, I'm going to hit you for more.
Speaker 1:And because we are heading from a duopoly between domain and realestatecom and, unfortunately for all of us in the real estate industry, we're quickly heading toward a monopoly, where it you know, realestatecom are essentially scorched earth. They've just blown all of their competitors off the park. Where does that sort of pricing behavior stop? And I think that is why the regulator is stepping in now, because if you want any evidence, if you want any evidence of how powerful realestatecom is becoming and what a threat they are becoming to the realtor in the process, the adjunct of this story is that the Ray White group and John McGrath investigated buying domain or going into business with domain to help give them teeth in their battle against realestatecom. Those discussions apparently no party's confirmed it, but it's in the media. This All these discussions were starting before the American company is it Constar, costar? Costar came in and took out domain.
Speaker 1:Yeah it's for a bargain price relative to their exposure relative to the share price of realestatecom.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's an interesting acquisition? I I certainly wonder. Because CoStar? I had a quick read about them as a company. I'd never heard of them, to be honest, but I'd certainly heard of some of their brands. So you know, costar owns a lot of the very big portals in the United States, owns On the Market in the UK a very, very large portal. They own Matterport, which is one of the imaging kind of companies used to do the majority of real estate, which is one of the imaging kind of companies used to do the majority of real estate, like they're a big real estate prop tech group, uh. So it'd be interesting to see what they do with domain and whether or not they find a way to revitalize.
Speaker 3:I guess the final point I'll make on this is, as you know, someone who looked after the real estate account for your business for a few years. One thing that is 100 true, uh, is that they will increase prices year on year by 10% to 12%, without any question. And the sad reality is, when they're doing it to you, they're doing it to other agencies and other individual agents out there and those costs are getting passed on and they know, as you say, while they've got this potential monopoly. They will just continue to tighten the screws and tighten the screws, and tighten the screws and unfortunately, I don't think agents have much choice but to just pay and keep going.
Speaker 1:The only choice available to agents is what is happening here. So what I'm detecting and you'll never really know but the real estate industry whilst they might be all shaking hands with their realestatecom account manager, there's a, there's a, there's a underground swell here from the real estate industry that are feeding the, the complaints and the information to the regulator as to what's happening. This is, this is heading towards battle of survival for the industry, because we are heading where you think about how big the real estate industry in Australia is, it's nearly all working for Rupert Murdoch. We're nearly at that point. I'll tell you now. We're on track to go that way, on the trajectory we're on.
Speaker 3:Oh, absolutely. I guess I've got a question for you and this is a little bit, uh, hypothetical but do you think that the rea's ultimate goal is to continue to work in the space to eventually just remove the agents altogether and effectively price the middleman out and create a platform that's, you know, utilizes ai tech to be self-sufficient without the agent needing?
Speaker 1:to be involved. Look who knows where it's all going with AI. So I don't know where it's going with AI. Ai could be realestatecom's best friend and final frontier, where that's the final plank they need in place to wipe the agent out of the process. Or AI could be the exact opposite, where that's the reset that the real estate industry is hoping and praying comes along again because real estate agents using the VPA model, which is the media company, charge us a lot of money. We go out and sell it to the consumer. The consumer pays. We don't feel it because we take five thousand dollars off kieran and give it to fairfax or realestatecom or domain or whoever it might be, and it's not really our cost, it's the consumer's cost. And then the internet wiped all that away yeah and real estate agents were off the hook.
Speaker 1:So what did they do?
Speaker 3:Started all over again.
Speaker 1:Just jumped back on the hook. Yeah, so I always say about the real estate industry I'm sorry to my industry colleagues for this, but the real estate industry is full of highly intelligent people, extremely good operators. Individually and as an industry, it's completely and utterly stupid.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So you don't see this in America, rupert Murdoch having this business in Australia, and and and Lachlan. They've tried to replicate this model in America, but the real estate industry has held control of itself. So in in America they're very collegial between themselves, the major real estate brands, and they don't let themselves get on the hook like the australian real estate industry is.
Speaker 3:So they've never been subjected to this sort of pricing that you've just outlined there yeah, yeah, and I think too in america it's much more collegial too between agents individually, right, so they're kind of using that's right a buyer, seller, agent model.
Speaker 3:One controls some listings, one controls others. Like it's not a yeah, you don't just go to the marketplace and say I want to buy that from the agent who's selling you. You engage an agent to work for you and that becomes a process, right? Yeah, look, it's interesting to see what will happen. I I think this is overdue and I will for our listeners. I will dig back, because you and I spoke about rea on a previous episode of the podcast and we did talk about their dominance and how people were looking to shift away and and the one, the one advertiser model. We did discuss that previously. So, if I do, that's right.
Speaker 3:Yes, I'll find that episode and I'll link it. So there is a bit of context there. You know, we can always say we spoke about this a long time ago, which we did uh. But I'll be interested to see because I think the industry needs this uh to reset, because the way it's storming forward at the moment it really is, you know, it's ignoring CPI, it's ignoring cost of living. This is just charging forward without any regard for, you know, what the end consumer has to pay.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's right. Well, it just is. It's unjustifiable, that's the word.
Speaker 3:Nothing's changed on their platform. You're just paying to continue, as is right.
Speaker 1:Look, I'd say it's modestly improved and there's features there. I wouldn't say that when you're on the platform you call it a bad platform. You can see the user experience is there, but have costs increased in line with the revenue growth of experience? No, costs are well behind what's happened there. But basically the real estate industry going back to the point we were discussing cannot rely on AI giving it a second chance at a reset, like the internet did in the early 2000s. So what is happening before? Realestatecom are a complete monopoly, uncontrollable. The real estate industry has gone to the regulator and said this is now on an untenable path and the reason I point that out is that when you're selling your home and you interview four agents, they're all enthusiastically selling the value and the virtues of realestatecom because they have to yeah but behind the scenes.
Speaker 1:The real estate industry is screaming about this and, as a consumer, you need to separate the pitch that the agent's giving you and they want your listing and the reality of what's going on behind the scenes. Why don't realestatecom strongly encourage private vendors? Because that would very quickly educate the market how much smoke and mirrors there are in all of these costs.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:When we go back to your Wentworth Courier landing on the doorstep in Ramwick. I accept there was a printer involved. There was a delivery involved. Unfortunately, some weeks it would get washed out if it wasn't put in the. You remember the plastic?
Speaker 2:sleeves that would come in during winter.
Speaker 1:Still is. So you could see hard-cored costs in that, which made it slightly justified. But, as we've just discussed here, the cost structure, or the increased costs that these websites would have experienced over the last 20 years, is well, well below the increase that they've extracted from the real estate industry and vendors who are leasing and selling their properties.
Speaker 3:Yeah, look, as a final point, I think my observation of them as a group is that the website is making money for their broader endeavors. Right, it's a prop tech company. Now. They're not just a listing platform. They're buying up different companies who do all kinds of things in the space. You know, they do all market research, they go, you know whatever it is. So I feel like those costs actually are just helping to funnel their r&d arms and whatever else they're doing behind the scenes and look, time will tell as to whether or not that is beneficial to the industry or not it's becoming an octopus.
Speaker 1:There's no doubt you know absolutely uh, two years ago they had a 20-year deal with one of the data house providers and that was pushed to the side and they opened up their own data arm.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Now where's the data coming from? It's coming from real estate agents listings who upload them there. Yeah, it's embedded in all of the agreements that when you upload a property on that website, that we get to use your information. So it's becoming an all-encompassing octopus with its tentacles wrapped around everything to do with property.
Speaker 3:You're absolutely right yeah, all right, good discussion, pete. As we move toward the close for tonight's episode, then I would just love to catch up on the week that's been in real estate and get a bit of a market wrap. If you can run us through what's been happening in auctions across sydney over the last seven days and are we seeing any improvement on on the horizon?
Speaker 1:yeah, well, look, uh. It must be noted that this is the first uh week's results after the may rate cut kieran and uh. Only for the third or fourth time since last august has the weekly auction clearance rate cracked 50, must be said for those that might be listening for the first time. And you said our podcast numbers have been going up they certainly have that's great.
Speaker 1:So anyone who's listening, for the first time, we get our auction data numbers from sqm research and we only take their results on a tuesday afternoon, because on a saturday evening when you hear that the auction clearance rate was 72 percent through the media, for example, that's 72 percent of the known results yep where? Um, when we say the auction clearance rate in in in sydney has, uh, cracked 50 last week, and that last week, and that's calibrated on the Tuesday after the Saturday and essentially 100% of the results are factored into that. But nevertheless the auction clearance rate has been hovering in the mid to high 40s for the last what's that? Eight, nine months. And for the third or fourth time since then it cracked 50% on the back of the rate cut. So you've got to call that a good result.
Speaker 1:And can I say that that was on pretty decent volumes too. It wasn't a low number. There were a thousand properties, 1,061 properties scheduled for auction for the week, 281 sold under the hammer, 252 sold prior and 51 sold afterwards. So yeah, decent result. 451 advertised for re-advertised for private treaty.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that is a big result. Actually I was going to ask how many auctions there were this week because I know last week I think was the first time in a while we'd been sub 800 and you know this week to be over 1,000, we're looking know about a 40, 40, 45 increase in auction numbers, which I mean that that is an indication that there's a bit, obviously there's more activity. The numbers don't lie uh, but that that increase of 40 on uh, when coupled with a rising clearance rate, is a bit of a good sign, I think. In my, in my view anyway, it's a sign that things are improving and stabilising a little.
Speaker 1:Oh, indeed, look. The other noticeable thing on the weekend, kieran, was inspection numbers were up, but they were up sharply on lower-priced properties, and when I say lower-priced properties, properties that probably sit below the median Sydney price of $1.45 million Yep, so anything below $1.45 million. We noticed really, really strong inspection numbers on the weekend, when we're obviously what are we today, wednesday evening? What I would say about the early start few days of this week is there was actually then a higher conversion rate of buyers that looked at properties last Saturday who were prepared to make offers on the Monday and the Tuesday.
Speaker 3:So that's you know people coming with intent and confidence on the weekend and then acting All year we've been seeing decent inspection numbers.
Speaker 1:At most listings get to Monday, tuesday and you're really trying to pick the eyes out of it about who was just walking through and who actually wants to come in off the bench and actually, you know, make an offer and have a play at the property. And that's where you disconnect in your campaigns is that you're communicating these very strong inspection numbers to your client. It's like, well, where's the offers? It's like there's hesitancy there from the buyers to come into the arena, where we've seen a much in the last few days. We've seen a much in the last few days. We've seen a much higher preparedness from buyers to follow through on their inspection and their second inspection and actually make an offer and enter into a negotiation with the vendor.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's interesting to see. I know I speculated last week and I'd asked you directly whether you thought the interest rate announcement alone would have any real impact. And it's only been one week so we can't make too many assumptions just yet, but certainly promising start off the back of that and I hope you know, if we continue throughout the next couple of months and there is positive activity or negative in the true in the sense of the rates themselves, but positive in terms of sentiment that we will see a continued, you know, appetite for transacting in property across Sydneydney, which is is always good for the economy and we saw a similar bounce in february after that rate cut.
Speaker 1:But then that was sort of, you know, pulled up very, very sharply and quickly on the back of trump's tariffs. That came through in the march. Yeah, and that quickly. You know it caused that. You know mini meltdown in the share market. Um, that quickly took the sentiment away. So we don't know how caused that you know mini meltdown in the share market that quickly took the sentiment away. So we don't know how long that sentiment would have lasted if it wasn't for for trump's tariffs and everything that went with it in march.
Speaker 1:It must be said today that the inflation number that came out today was a bit touch and go. Was it? The headline inflation held at 2.4, but the underlying inflation crept up from 2.7 to 2.8. It must also be noted that the Reserve Bank of New Zealand cut rates again today and there's sort of really interesting stuff going on because if you look at what's happening in America, inflation pressures are really still evident there and across the ditch here in new zealand they can't cut rates fast enough yeah after they cut rates today, which I think might be the fifth or sixth time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they flagged more rate cuts. Yeah, and here we are. In australia, we cut rates tuesday week ago and then we get an inflation number today which probably wasn't as good as everyone would like it to be. Won't cause the RBA to change course, but yeah, seeing the underlying inflation creep up was not what anybody wanted.
Speaker 3:No, it's certainly going to be an interesting couple of months ahead. We've got some tariff pauses and we've got, you know, trump just kind of consolidating his you know his homeland activity at the moment. So I think you know, what happens over the next three to four months will certainly be interesting for the market, but for financial markets overall the one, the one that I don't like that's going on is, I think the ukraine russia war is going somewhere really bad yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm surprised markets are as calm as they are. Europe are dialing it up through Ukraine. They're given Ukraine permission to fire long-range missiles made or gifted to them by the UK and Germany into Russia. Yep, and we've seen that Trump thought he had Putin where he wanted him and he's got him anything but that's oh geez.
Speaker 3:Is there an escalation point coming?
Speaker 1:Oh, I hope that can be put back in the bottle, because that is deteriorating and who knows where that one goes.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and unfortunately I don't think Trump's got the wherewithal to do much about it. Mate, look really great chat tonight, peter, some, as always, important topics and, as I mentioned, for our listeners, I'll certainly go back and find our last episode addressing the REA website listing debacle. But, peter, thank you for your insights into not only this particular case, but you've worked with REA for such a long time. Having someone with your experience talk about what has changed is really good information for us to kind of get out for everyone.
Speaker 1:Thanks, Kieran, it was great great chat.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you, and thanks to everyone for listening to Current Market Insights. We look forward to speaking with you next time.
Speaker 2:Thanks for joining us on the Current Market Insights podcast brought to you by Harris Partners Real Estate, the podcast providing real estate insights you won't find anywhere else.
