photo credit: dirkjanranzijn

Our I Want to Live Here report was quoted in yesterday’s Age …

photo credit: °Florian

C’mon you can’t be serious but that’s what the lobbyists are looking for with commercial property …

The Sydney Morning Herald is on our side. Today’s headline news includes an article featuring Bubblepedia.net, a wiki set up by Dr Daniel Cox for photos of vacant homes to be uploaded onto the web. What a great idea! We have a Panoramia page with some of our vacant photos uploaded.

The article, entitled Empty Homes for All to See, is an indictment on the inaccuracy of vacancy figures collected by a group with a vested interest in skewing the results their way.

We pointed out in the I Want to Live Here report that the published vacancy figures of the Real Estate Industry of Victoria are inaccurate. They only list those properties on the market at present, those advertised through Real Estate Agents. This excludes:

those that are being held off the market because the capital gains of 15% per annum are at least double the annual rental income – why bother renting them out?
all those properties that are being privately advertised
those that are used only once per year (ie owners fly in when Melbourne Racing Carnival is on or Sydney Fireworks)

The overstated scarcity of land and property encourages an atmosphere of desperation in the buying market. A genuine vacancy rate would include all vacant property, especially vacant land, which constituted 93% of the vacancies in the I Want to Live Here report.