Current Market Insights
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Current Market Insights
Talking Property - State of the Market June 2025
Australia's best property analyst, SQM Research's Louis Christopher joined us to discuss the Sydney property market.
In this chat, we discuss the the market response to the two interest rate cuts, what the RBA are likely to do in July and the rise of the rental market when compared with wage growth. All of this is covered in Louis' market breakdown and much more...
As always if there is a specific topic you would like for us to cover, please reach out and let us know!
Welcome to Talking Property. Today, I'm joined by Australia's best property analyst, louis Christopher, as we dissect the state of the Sydney property market. Louis, thanks always for joining us. Good to be with you once again, louis. We last caught up in December and much has happened since then, locally and globally. So let's recap with our first slide some of the things that have happened before we get your take on the first six months of 2025. So we had the Trump inauguration, which we knew was coming. That wasn't a shock event in December, because he was already president elect. We knew his tariffs were coming, but it really rattled stock markets there for a short period, didn't it? That's right.
Speaker 1:Yes, markets were rattled and then they stabilised, especially when Trump started to soften up on his rhetoric on tariffs. I must say, as an observer, it's been challenging to follow his latest moves on tariffs. It seems to change week by week and I think that's created a fair degree of confusion out there, but nevertheless, equity markets at least have have settled as a result of trump's less aggressive stance on tariffs. Nevertheless, there are tariffs that are there that we did not have this time last year.
Speaker 2:Do you have a view when it comes to Donald Trump? Does he have a true north that he's playing to, or is he as flippant privately with his tariff policy as what he is publicly?
Speaker 1:Oh gee. I think only those close to Trump will know this in terms of what is the fundamental truth. I think, from the pure conservative, libertarian point of view, trump's been a disappointment. Libertarians centre-right type of folk, generally view the world that we should have free trade and that is the best way to solve the world's poverty problems. Solve the world's poverty problems and tariffs generally create an environment which is not conducive to economic growth over the long term. So I think there are certainly large elements that were, and probably still are, part of his base which are disappointed by this move.
Speaker 2:Then we move towards rate cuts in February. Now I'm not sure what your data showed. What we felt on the ground is the February rate cut was received very well and then it was washed off very quickly by the breakout in tariffs in early to mid-March. I'm not sure if that correlates with what your data was telling you.
Speaker 1:Our data reveals that the period post the rate cut was one where the market was still patchy, still kind of soft. I put it in part down to the up and coming election as well as the uncertainty surrounding the tariffs. But I think it was more the fact that the federal election was coming, and we've noted historically that when federal elections are called you see a degree of uncertainty in the market in the lead up to the election day.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this election campaign coincided with school holidays. Clashed with was run over the Easter and Anzac Day long weekends, that's right. So, more than any other that I can remember, that election campaign really put the handbrake on the economy, and I was speaking to car salespeople, people in a range of businesses that were experiencing the same thing through April.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And it really pulled up hard.
Speaker 1:That's right and I think that came through on the March quarter GDP numbers which have been recently released and that showed quite a weak economy for the first quarter of the calendar year and I think for the June quarter we'll still see some patchiness of the overall economy following that. Well, as a result of the federal election.
Speaker 2:I reread your boom and bust report before today and I noticed with interest. And just to show you how savagely the political fortunes turned against Peter Dutton, in your boom and bust report you essentially had the Liberals on track for victory, such was the polling at the time. That's right, and it couldn't have turned into a more decisive defeat for him.
Speaker 1:Well, just as well. I'm a housing analyst, peter, and not an election expert. Yeah, look, at the time it did appear as though Dutton was going to win. He was ahead on the polls and, as you rightly state, that all turned around essentially on the announcement of the election. You know it seemed to turn from that point onwards and of course we can deliberate why that occurred. I put it down to a bad campaign run by the Libs from what I could see, but yeah, certainly, whatever the reason behind it. Yeah, the Libs from what I could see, but yeah, certainly, whatever the reason behind it. Yeah, the Libs certainly didn't get up. It was one of their worst election results they've ever experienced.
Speaker 2:Indeed. Look, we can speculate on why it was such a bad campaign. I think the interest rate cut in February played very well for Albo. Inflation being contained gave him a good talking point that he hadn't had for the previous six months. Inflation fell within the target range, both underlying inflation and headline inflation, which was good. As we record today, the Middle East is on the brink of all-out war, so we won't try and pretend to know where that issue goes. Hopefully it settles down, but it looks like it's in escalation mode. Sadly that could do anything to markets, but it is something that's been brewing all year.
Speaker 1:It's interesting that equity markets at least have been relatively stable, despite the escalations which have occurred and the conflict that's there and the conflict that's there. So, yeah, the equity markets appear to be relatively bullish. That this will all play out fairly reasonably or fairly peacefully in the end. I'm not so sure. I have the same view, but it is interesting how markets are like. Yeah, you know, let's move on. It's remarkable isn't it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it certainly is, because, in theory, 12 months ago, if you said that Israel and Iran were going to go at it in a full on manner, you would have thought that would be the catalyst for a stock market crash. No doubt, yeah, absolutely yeah. So it must be pointed out that during the first six months of 2025, it looks like all efforts to bring peace in the Ukraine-Russia war have failed as well. So there's issues raging there. Housing approvals fell, yet the immigration numbers are still strong, too strong relative to the number of houses they are still too strong.
Speaker 2:So that's a tailwind for property prices, isn't it? These are not all negative factors.
Speaker 1:Yes yes. These are competing factors, purely looking at it, whether you're someone that's a believer in strong immigration or someone that's not a believer in strong immigration. Just purely looking at it, a combination of very strong population growth, which is what we're still experiencing, plus cuts in interest rates are generally pretty positive for housing prices.
Speaker 2:That's right, and it's playing through.
Speaker 1:It doesn't take me to tell you that it's pretty obvious, and I think our most leading indicators are suggesting that the market is actually starting to pick up.
Speaker 2:And the auction clearance rate has been hovering around 50% since last August. I noticed, leading into the February rate cut, that it actually went through 50% a few times. So we were starting to see increased confidence and numbers, there weren't we?
Speaker 1:We were and then in the weeks leading up to the election it softened up again on our numbers. Post the election clearance rates steadied in Sydney. And then we note before the June long weekend we recorded one of the highest results in Sydney so far this year where it did crack 50% once more and yeah, it was suggesting to us that there were more buyers out there and I think post the May rate cut there has been more interest in the market and also keeping in mind a lot of speculation that we'll see another rate cut in July, yeah, certainly after the May rate cut.
Speaker 2:What we saw is there was always been strong inspection numbers in the inner west. But when you sort of do your follow-ups midweek, if you like a lot of that buyer interest falls away when you're trying to push, you know, or encourage buyers to take the next step. But post the May rate cut we saw a higher preparedness from buyers to turn their positive inspection into making an offer, just to you know, see where it would go with the vendor. And we started having bidding wars. Yep, you know, pretty tough bidding wars, multiple buyers trying to buy one property. That we haven't seen for sort of nine, 12 months on, you know, as a trend line, like we have in the last few weeks.
Speaker 1:And I think on the next rate cut we have, we're going to see more of that.
Speaker 2:When we talk about the Sydney property market from the 1st of January to the end of June. When we put all of those factors into the mix, what did the numbers tell us about price growth?
Speaker 1:Louis, our numbers tell us that for the first half of 2025, Sydney housing prices have risen modestly. They're up by about 2% thus far this year.
Speaker 2:Okay, so that's annualised at 4%, so they're just in front of the rate of inflation.
Speaker 1:Yes, that is correct. The expectation, though, going forward, is that we will see an acceleration in the second half of 2025.
Speaker 2:I'll bring up our next slide here, which is your scenarios for 2025. Yes, and I noticed that you made a change in your base scenario after the second rate cut. Do you want to walk us through that?
Speaker 1:Yes. So those familiar with our forecast know that we release about four scenarios each year for the year ahead and we put our hat on a base case in terms of what we think is most likely outcome For this year. Our scenario three had an assumption that there would be a rate cut in the March quarter, which did materialise. So once that happened, we went out there to our subscribers and to the wider public and stated that, ok, there's actually only one scenario left on our forecast, which is scenario three that we're holding our hat on and at this point in time we're still holding our hat on that. We're quite confident that the numbers we had in scenario three are going to play out for most cities and with that second bullet point.
Speaker 2:There, population growth is above 500,000. Again, was that the government's projection or have they broken their own promise on that point?
Speaker 1:They've broken their promise once more Well, promise is probably not the right word for it. Position they had a target or basically treasury, federal treasury had a target number which basically feeds through as a key assumption in their budget outlook, and that number was lower than 500 000 in terms of total absolute growth. I think the number was like 360 370 000, but when you look at the monthly uh overseas arrival numbers and the migration numbers we've got to date, I I just the numbers are looking a lot more stronger than that, and so we're quite confident that we will see yet another year of population growth over and above 500,000 people.
Speaker 2:So I think this is a really big point for assessing the strength of the economy v what people are going through household to household. These numbers really cook the government's books, don't they? Because 500,000 extra people coming into the economy create all of this economic activity. That's right. But we keep hearing from market analysts about a per capita recession. So do you want to talk to us about that, where the government's numbers suggesting everything is looking good because they're bringing in 500,000 plus a year, but from household to household, they're really battling the scenario? Well, that's exactly right.
Speaker 1:On paper, the government can still say Australia is having real economic growth. The reality, though, is that when we look on a per person basis, we've been seeing falling living standards now since, really, the start of 2023, if I recall the numbers. So this is why it feels for most people that everybody's been going backwards a bit, but yet the economy still moves forwards. The economy still moves forwards and that that is because, in terms of total uh gdp, it's been expanding, in part due to the strong flow of migration numbers. When you bring more people in, they demand food, they demand tvs, they demand a place to live. That does create economic activity, but in terms of economic activity per person, we've been going backwards, and that is in part as a result of a number of factors.
Speaker 1:Productivity has been falling away per person. Number one. Number two I'm a strong believer that when we went through the COVID period, that actually really knocked out our maximum capacity, economic capacity, so what I call aggregated supply. Our output actually contracted. That was, in part, working from home, in other parts, a situation where a lot of the employment growth activity was driven by government, which is not exactly the most productive activity you can see in the economy as opposed from the private sector, and so that has contributed to this, this reality that, on a per person basis, we've been going backwards.
Speaker 2:Louis let's get into the rental market. You put a forecast forward there as well. Yes, how do you think the market's performing relative to your forecast? The sydney rental market it's been.
Speaker 1:The reality has been, for the first half of this year, that rents have steadied, so they've been no longer accelerating at the rate of growth that we had in 2021 22 23 rents remain elevated, of course, so so they certainly haven't returned back to where we were pre-COVID, and that is in part because we've been having very strong population growth and the supply on the building side has not been keeping up with that. In fact, we're well down on longer term averages in terms of dwellings completed completed, so that has kept rents elevated. But the reality has also been to that a lot of the rental crisis has now been priced in to the rental market, so we definitely seen a big rise in rents. Has the situation deteriorated further? No, and going back to this notion of living standards going backwards, the ability for a person to take out a property on a higher rate has reduced, and how the population's been responding is by basically grouping together more.
Speaker 2:Share households.
Speaker 1:Share households, younger people staying with their parents for longer. This is how the market's been responding, and that's freed up a little bit of stock out there, which has essentially put a cap on further rises in rents.
Speaker 2:I must say, on the ground, and obviously we only work mainly in one geographical region, but I do do the odd rental open inspection because I just like to see it and feel it for myself. And each winter we find days on market for rentals is longer than in the warmer months, but not so this year, and one of the rentals that I did in Roselle last Saturday or the Saturday before had 16 genuine parties turn up and many of those were, as you just described, shared household arrangements, young people clubbing together but it's very rare and it's very rare for us to see 16 parties turn up to one rental open inspection in winter.
Speaker 1:Well, the numbers don't lie. What they show is that it's still a very tight rental market in Sydney, with the rental vacancy rate well below two percent. So it is still a landlord's market in Sydney, arguably not as much as where it was back in 2023, but still there are more tenants than what there are rental properties as we speak.
Speaker 2:I want to go to this graph here Louis weekly asking property prices. What's this one telling us?
Speaker 1:So we measure where vendors set their asking price and I've generally found over the long term it's been a good, actual leading indicator in terms of where the market is heading. And what we generally find is that vendors are actually quite overall, as a market, quite responsive to market changes. Of course you will always have vendors certain vendors who will stick to their asking price no matter what the market's doing, but overall vendors as a group are reasonably responsive to the market and what this is showing fundamentally is that in Sydney, A houses have been outperforming units for quite some time. B the rate of growth has slowed from where we were, say, in 21 through to 22,. But we're still seeing rising asking prices and that's feeding through into rising actual prices.
Speaker 2:And would it be fair to say these rate cuts are making vendors more bullish? It may or may not be a justified position, but is the data showing that as they cut rates, there's a higher propensity from vendors to put their asking prices up?
Speaker 1:I think there is an element of that. What's also occurring in Sydney is that old listings have been rising and rising and rising. So there is a higher proportion of vendors out there who cannot move their property, in part because they have expectations which are well above the market. And so in this market it's neither not too hot nor too cold.
Speaker 2:It is still a market if you misprice your property expected to be on the market for a long time. Yeah, indeed, so there's not that upward growth in prices where vendors can name their price and someone will come along.
Speaker 1:We're not at that fear of missing out stage yet in the market. It's not to say we won't get to that point with interest rate cuts. I think we may. But at this point in time if you misprice your property, you're not going to sell in Sydney.
Speaker 2:We are cautioning our clients as they come to market. Is there's two types of listings in this, in this environment, those that sell in three weeks and those that take more than three months?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right and, as our data shows, you can find it on our website. You look up Sydney total listings. You can just see this rising and rising trend of stock that's been on the market for over 180 days in Sydney.
Speaker 2:Louis. I want to look at our next slide here From a societal perspective. Is a city that's running with a $2 million house price and a $1 million unit price? Is that healthy? Should we look at this and we should say this is great news? Look what property prices are doing in Sydney. Or should we look at this and say this is strangling our youth's future?
Speaker 1:Oh well, I'm very much in the latter camp. I don't think it's a great positive to have a situation like this where housing prices are just so unaffordable for those who are on an average income. Let's keep in mind here that these prices are just out of the realms of affordability for essential service workers in Sydney. You're not going to find the average nurse being able to live in, say, the middle ring of Sydney now, unless they're living in, say, a one-bedroom below average unit. That's where we're at with it all, and that's not healthy, that's not good for the city?
Speaker 2:Definitely not.
Speaker 1:No, it's not. It is problematic, and the way to resolve this is to increase supply relative to demand. So a situation where, okay, I don't advocate necessarily we need a housing price crash, but we need a period where housing prices do no more than say the growth rate of GDP over the long term and the reality is real housing prices, after we take into account inflation in Sydney, have been rising and rising and rising for a long, long time now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Stephen Kikoulis, on social media, made a great point the other week. He said no one has ever explained to me what a fair house price is, you know, relative to income, et cetera. Because people will go back and say in the 70s it took five times the average income, or whatever it was, to purchase a property. And now that equation's blown well out in favour of vendors to the detriment of the buyers. If Sydney's running at a $2 million house price and a $1 million unit price and we're saying that this is unhealthy and it's run too hard and it's above itself, what would you speculate it should be at?
Speaker 1:Good question, I think as a multiple of household earnings, I think anything that's really above eight or nine times that is relatively unhealthy if it happens over the long term.
Speaker 2:And what are we running at at the moment?
Speaker 1:I think we're running at close to 10, if I recall the number.
Speaker 2:It's right up there.
Speaker 1:As mentioned, we need a period where housing prices in Sydney run at no more than the standard economic growth rate. If we were to achieve that, we'd see long-term affordability improvements. Look, I think Sydney will always be expensive. It always has been expensive to an extent. But looking back at history, yeah, it's probably at its most expensive point relative to incomes than what we've ever seen. And yeah, that is an issue for social cohesion and for the social fabric of Sydney in the long term. No, indeed, you can see it.
Speaker 2:You touched on vacancy rates. Here's your May 2025 vacancy rates. How does this compare with?
Speaker 1:history. The historical vacancy rates that we're seeing across Australia, where we're running at essentially about 1.2%, is well below average.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's what's causing rents to rise, because it's just stuck below. That's right Now.
Speaker 1:It's been stuck below that really since 2021. So we've been in this rental crisis now for some years and we're not really seeing anything on the ground to suggest it's about to relieve itself. As mentioned earlier, a lot of the rental pricing has now been taken into account with this rental crisis, in other words, the rental crisis has been priced in, so we're seeing steadier rental growth, as opposed to what we had in 21, 22 and 23, where in some cities, we were recording rental increases year on year of over 20%. That's no longer happening, fortunately.
Speaker 2:There was a lot of catch up in that, as we've discussed in the past, though wasn't there coming from the COVID crash of rents?
Speaker 1:Yes, that's right, but in real terms, we're well and truly above those COVID levels. Oh, now we are. Yes, yeah, yeah, indeed.
Speaker 2:I think our next slide highlights this really, really well. This is probably, I think, the best slide that we've got for our audience today. Everything you've just said is encapsulated here, isn't it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, what it shows is essentially rental. Affordability has been deteriorating for a considerable period of time and there is nothing in the leading data to suggest that it's improved.
Speaker 2:No, that's right. It's amazing that this was not a bigger issue during the election campaign.
Speaker 1:It certainly could have been, but I think the problem that the Liberal Party had with this is that they flip-flopped a bit on migration, which we all know is one of the major causes behind this issue right now. Relative to supply, and I don't think their policies were stronger enough in terms of trying to address the supply side, because it appeared to me from an objective analysis of what their their solutions were to stimulate demand.
Speaker 2:Oh, both sides. Yeah, I was watching the policy coming out saying this is mad. They're talking about fueling the demand. It's like where's the supply? You're only pushing prices up on the people here further, peter as I've said repeatedly, there are two issues.
Speaker 1:There is a demand side, driven by migration. There is a supply side constrained supply side, which has been driven by a combination of factors, including very high taxes, militant councils, banks who are even more cautious to lend to developers, and a community overall which has experienced bad quality when it comes to off-the-plan developments in our major cities for a number of years now, and that combination has been constraining supply for some time.
Speaker 2:Throwing an extra thing over the top of all of that. What we're seeing is developers don't want to develop. They're saying the feasibility on all of this doesn't unless there's a dramatic drop in land prices. These projects are not stacking up. We're staying on the sideline. We'd rather have cash in the bank and get our 5% than take this sort of risk.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm not so sure we'll see a fall on land prices. But if developers were to look on their book and say, okay, great, the government has now worked to cut our taxes on each dwelling by half, then we can now build again.
Speaker 2:So that's where, you see, the leverage point is is government coming to the table?
Speaker 1:The truth is, for every dwelling that goes up, about 20 to 40% of that price.
Speaker 2:That cost are taxes, whether they be local, state or federal and do you think the government is going to try and build these 1.2 million dwellings themselves and oversee it and be heavily involved, or they will push it towards the private sector?
Speaker 1:Oh well, to be clear, they've stated that the 1.2 million target is for all dwellings, whether it's social development or development done under private means. And, yeah, look, there's been dwellings that have been completed, as they would have been anyway, from the start of the time frame, which, if you recall, was July 2024. But they are behind, seriously behind, the run rate required at this point in time, and I put the probabilities of the government hitting their 1.2 million target which is meant to happen by mid-2029, at next to zero at this stage.
Speaker 2:Chris Minns is having a harrowing time finding sites, isn't he that offer scale in terms of dwellings?
Speaker 1:This is the problem with Sydney. It's easier Melbourne there, because there's a lot more land to basically sprawl out on, but in Sydney it's it's definitely more difficult, and so you know, part of the solution is you build more high density dwellings in the inner and middle rings of Sydney, which you know has been part of the plan. But the issue you have is you have a lot of NIMBYs in those areas who are on council boards and they're resisting as much as they possibly can.
Speaker 2:Look to outline everything you've just said in encapsulated in one building. Chris Minns took a bow on social media recently because the Tigers Leagues Club's been approved and it's underway and I think they're taking their first deposits in the next week or so. Yeah, after having a pretty intense marketing campaign, I sat with someone yesterday that put a $10,000, you know registration fee down for one of these apartments. This is in June 2025 and expects to take hold of the apartment in some time in 2028. Right, so we've got a housing crisis today.
Speaker 1:Well, that's a good news story, and then I'll refer you to what was meant to happen at the Rainery Racecourse. Yes, there was meant to be a lot of development activity there, which was blocked by the members.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the Rose Hill Racecourse.
Speaker 1:Sorry, yes, Rose Hill.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the point being, though, we've got a housing crisis today in terms of a large scale new development coming online in the inner west of Sydney. It will actually only create new supply in 2028. What do we do for the next three years?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right, that's right. In the meantime, the population will keep expanding. Yes, so it's barely going to make a dent into the problem.
Speaker 2:Oh, indeed, louis. We'll finish on this point today. You were in the news unintentionally. In the last few months, you received a phone call or an email, was it?
Speaker 1:I was just getting into my day's work a couple of months ago and I received an email which I first thought was spam, a very threatening email from supposedly my bank, the Commonwealth Bank, threatening to freeze my accounts unless I address and answer some very personal questions. I phoned up the bank to make sure whether this was genuine or not and they definitely confirmed it was genuine. They gave me the opportunity to answer their questions over the phone, which I I took, and the questions went well beyond just double checking my ID and can we, before we get to that, then we discuss the level of the threats, as you put it, that they were putting across.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so they were threatening to freeze all my personal accounts I have with the CBA, including my superannuation account. They threatened that I would not be able to use the ATM. They threatened I would not be able to use my card for anything at all. And yeah, in this cashless society, that's a that's in this cashless society. That's a serious threat.
Speaker 2:Indeed, and do you? Obviously CBA were carrying this message, but they weren't doing it as a company policy. Do you hold the bank to account on this, or do you blame the government department that are imposing this on the banks? Did the CBA run too deep in interpreting what they thought their obligations were? I'm not sure why you would have been flagged as a suspicious customer. Or is this what the government are doing to the people through the banks.
Speaker 1:I think it's more the latter than the former. So AUSTRAC made a public statement at the time saying we do not require the banks to freeze customer accounts on the data that they seek. But the reality is on the ground that if the banks don't take action against what AUSTRAC perceives as being high-risk customers, then the banks can be sued by AUSTRAC, and that has actually happened.
Speaker 2:And is there any reason, without asking you to divulge your affairs, why you would be flagged as a high risk customer?
Speaker 1:Well, good question. I have a successful business, sqm Research, and that's turned into a sizeable business. So I guess occasionally some of my transactions can be sizable. But it was just a line of questioning which I just found extremely intrusive. So we got to the point with the questioning where CBA wanted to know whether I had cash at home and why do I have cash at home? That's extraordinary and it's like that's none of their business.
Speaker 2:Absolutely not.
Speaker 1:You know and when you think about it, potentially a security risk for myself and my family if that information were to get out, and we all are aware that the banks have had data breaches.
Speaker 2:Oh, indeed, I remember when we purchased our home I went through the thing where you hold the phone and you self-ID yourself, answered a lot of personal questions and then, 15 minutes later, I got a phone call from, I don't mind saying, an Indian gentleman who sounded like he was phoning from Mars. The line was horrendous, which was the flag. This is dodgy, but he knew I had just finished a phone call with ANZ and he was phoning to reconfirm some information.
Speaker 1:Unbelievable.
Speaker 2:And clearly what had happened is someone in ANZ has leaked it to his friend out the side and said now, if you call these people and so I just need to reconfirm a few data points, and there's your leak and your hack.
Speaker 1:right there there is your leak, right there, you need your guard up.
Speaker 2:I rang. I rang the personal banker and said look, mate, this is what's happened. And he rolled my eyes and he said well, what do you want me to do about it? You're right, it's, it's clearly a leak. It's not.
Speaker 1:You're not the first person that's told us and thankfully, you're wise to it yet, at the same time, the bank under threat of freezing your accounts and demanding very, very personal information.
Speaker 2:Yes, and that can go anywhere.
Speaker 1:It can go anywhere. Finally, with that call, they actually demanded, as part of this and if I didn't agree to it, that they would once again freeze my accounts, that they could share the information that I just gave them to government departments but also to other third-party credit providers, so that information about whether I had cash at home and why was going to be shared around. Outrageous. It's not acceptable, and the issue which I'm trying to push but I feel like I'm taking on a glide from doing this is we need to see a change in the privacy laws. We need to see a situation where the banks cannot freeze people's accounts unless it's by a court order or a specific government directive.
Speaker 2:So we are on the verge there of a social credit system. We are yeah.
Speaker 1:I agree with you. We are, we've been, you know, these things just move by inches, by inches, by inches, and people just are not aware. So there was never a mass TV story that the government now requires you to tell a bank whether you've got cash at home or not. But yet here we are. Maybe it's not happening to everyone, but it's happening to quite a large number of us where they're now asking this very question.
Speaker 2:That's a great point you raise. We're losing our freedoms incrementally.
Speaker 1:Incrementally and there's no grand media release about it. It's just happening behind the scenes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like boiling the frog. You put him in cold water and you slowly dial the temperature of the water up and it doesn't know when to get out. It stays there and boils.
Speaker 1:That's right, that's so what we're fundamentally talking about is the decline of civil liberties happening in the Western world. It's not just happening here in Australia, it's happening elsewhere as well, and that's not on. And this is not a left versus right issue.
Speaker 2:This is an issue that affects all of us, oh great, I think everybody should be alarmed about what you've outlined here today. And you know you put this on social media, and then the media, the mainstream media, came looking for you on it and you were gracious enough to put yourself forward and good on you for highlighting it.
Speaker 1:But it's gone quiet again. And this is a problem we're in society now is that these outrageous things which happen, since there's so many of them, society forgets what's happened five minutes ago. Until it happens to them, until it happens to them, until it happens to them. But the problem is, when it happens to them, it's too late.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Louis, thanks for sharing that story with us, as alarming as it is, and that was an outstanding wrap on the first half of the 2025 Sydney property market. You're welcome, peter, nice, to be with you. Once again, thanks, louis, and thank you for joining us today on Talking Property.
Speaker 1:We look forward to speaking with you next time.
