Australia isn’t short of land. Anyone who’s driven ninety minutes out of Melbourne or Sydney and watched the paddocks keep going has seen the evidence through the windscreen. We’re one of the emptiest developed countries on earth, and we talk about Australia’s housing shortage as though we’re running out of room.

We’re not running out of room. We’re running out of trunk.

Trunk, or trunk infrastructure, is a word the planning and construction industries use every day and almost nobody else has ever heard. It covers the sewage, the water, the electricity, the gas, the roads and the public transport that turn a paddock into somewhere a person can actually live. Land without trunk isn’t housing supply. It’s a map.

That distinction sounds like a planning technicality. It’s the whole argument, and it’s the reason Australia’s housing shortage has survived thirty years of people insisting the answer is obvious.

You can listen to the full segment with Phil Whelan on RTHK Radio 3 Morning Brew below:

What Australia’s housing shortage actually looks like on the ground

Here’s what the gap looks like on the ground, and some version of it happens in this country almost every month.

Somebody subdivides a farm an hour and a half out from the city. It gets carved into quarter acre blocks. It gets a name, an entry statement and a billboard with a family on it. It’s called a suburb, and it’s counted as supply.

Then people move in. They rely one hundred per cent on their own transport, because the nearest supermarket or school is fifteen or twenty minutes away by car. The bus route arrives years later, if it arrives at all. The pioneers who go out there know exactly what they’re doing, and I’ve got no argument with them. They’re trading amenity for a front door of their own, and they’ve made that trade with their eyes open.

But nobody should pretend that a subdivision without trunk is the same thing as a suburb. We’ve been doing this for decades and calling it supply. The number goes up. The problem doesn’t go down.

The blame that’s too easy

Whenever Australia’s housing shortage comes up, the conversation arrives within about ninety seconds at migration. We brought a lot of people here in a short period, the argument runs, and they took the houses.

I don’t accept it, and I’ve been consistent about that. It’s too easy a blame and it isn’t necessarily right.

Population growth is real and it’s genuinely part of the picture. We don’t have enough physical dwellings for the people who are already here. But if this were purely a numbers problem then land would solve it, and we’ve established that we’ve got land for days. What we haven’t got is the trunk, the construction workforce, the planning throughput, and the cultural willingness to live in anything other than a freestanding house on its own patch of dirt.

Every one of those is a decision. Migration is a convenient explanation precisely because it’s somebody else’s doing. The trunk gap is nobody’s fault in particular, which is exactly why it never gets fixed. I made a related argument about the way we use population figures to avoid the harder conversation when Australia crossed 28 million people, and nothing since has changed my mind.

The other half of it’s cultural, and Australians like this part even less. The great Australian dream is a freestanding home on a quarter acre block with room for the car. It’s a good dream and I want people to be able to have it. But housing an entire population that way eats an enormous amount of land and an enormous amount of trunk per household, and it’s dramatically cheaper to build apartments. Much of Asia, parts of Europe and parts of the United States got comfortable with density generations ago. We didn’t. That’s not a moral failing. It’s a choice with a price attached, and we’ve been paying the price without ever admitting we made the choice.

There are supply-side answers being tested, including printing houses, which I looked at in Can We Print Our Way Out of Australia’s Housing Crisis?. Some of them are genuinely promising. But every printed house still needs a pipe to connect to.

Where I came into this, and it wasn’t as a commentator

I’ve been arguing about how Australians will live for a long time. In 2014 I told The New Daily that our grandchildren would rent in the clouds, and that home ownership was becoming a dream of the past. In 2015 I was on 4BC calling the death of the quarter acre block. Neither was a comfortable thing to say at the time and both got the reaction you’d expect.

But my first real contact with this was personal, and it was 1995.

I needed to renovate. We had permission to put several more bedrooms onto a house that hadn’t been built yet, my wife was pregnant, and we were about seven months out from our second child. The loan was going to take a while, because in those days the banks took a while, and a pregnancy doesn’t negotiate.

So I went to the Yellow Pages, which is where you went to find people you didn’t know. There was nobody in it. The category didn’t exist. I eventually found what I needed in the back of The Age, in the classifieds, in a small advertisement for something called a mortgage broker.

That’s how young this industry is. I couldn’t find it in the phone book. In those early days the banks didn’t much like the brokers, the brokers were still working out what they were, and the whole thing looked like a fringe idea that might not survive the decade. I wrote about where it was heading in 2018 for Australian Broker, and even then I was more conservative than what actually happened.

What thirty years did

Eighty one per cent of new residential home lending in Australia now goes through a broker rather than directly to a bank. That’s the March 2026 quarter, and according to the Mortgage and Finance Association of Australia it’s a record. In March 2018 the figure was 55.3 per cent. Twenty five points in eight years. In that single quarter, brokers settled $124.88 billion in new home loans.

Australia is now one of only three countries on earth above eighty per cent. Us, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Everywhere else, including most of Asia, you still walk into a branch and sit across a desk from somebody who works for the lender.

Nobody announced that. There was no referendum on inserting a third party into the middle of the largest financial decision most Australians will ever make. It happened one kitchen table at a time, and by the point anyone thought to comment on it, it had already become the default.

The supply figures are just as blunt. The National Housing Supply and Affordability Council reports that Australia is already around 112,000 homes behind the pace the National Housing Accord requires, and that the time needed to save a deposit has risen from nine years in 2015 to 11.2 years now.

Read that last one slowly. In a decade we added more than two years of saving to the front of a young person’s life, and we did it without deciding to. Four capital cities now take more than a decade to save a deposit. In Sydney it’s 13.3 years. The regions have converged with the capitals, which means the escape hatch people used to talk about has quietly closed.

Set that against what a house used to cost in the same currency. In the mid 1980s an Australian home ran to somewhere around three to four times annual income. The national median dwelling value passed $922,838 in February 2026, and Sydney’s median multiple now sits above ten times median household income. The asset didn’t change. The relationship between the asset and a working life did.

And here’s the number I care about most, because I put it in print before it was fashionable. I first wrote it in 2017 and published it in Australian Conveyancer in January 2024: ten million more Australians by 2040, taking us to somewhere near 36 million, and two million more homes needed to house them. That’s my forecast and I want it read as mine, not as a Bureau projection, because some official series land nearer 30 to 33 million and I’d rather own the number than borrow authority for it. I’ve been hoping I was wrong ever since I wrote it. It’s tracking.

Which is the real point about the shortage. It isn’t a cycle. It doesn’t come back around.

The consequence nobody has costed

Now the part that doesn’t make the news, and it’s the one that matters most to anyone planning further out than a couple of years.

In 1996, 18 per cent of Australians aged 55 to 64 carried mortgage debt. The great Australian dream was never really the house. It was killing the loan as fast as humanly possible and owning the thing outright. That was the finish line, and most people crossed it well before they stopped working.

Today that figure is 54 per cent. Three times what it was in a single generation. And the median age at which Australians finally extinguish their home loan has moved from 52 in 1981 to 62 in 2016, according to the ABS Survey of Income and Housing and the 2020 Retirement Income Review. Ten years of a person’s life, added to the back end of a mortgage, while nobody was watching. Finder’s 2026 Home Loan Report puts it a different way and lands in the same place: 44 per cent of Australian homeowners either plan to retire carrying mortgage debt or already have.

Here’s the ripple almost nobody follows through. Australia’s entire retirement architecture was designed on a single unstated assumption: that you arrive at retirement owning your home outright. The age pension rate assumes it. The superannuation guarantee was calibrated against it. Every piece of modelling underneath the system quietly presumes there’s no housing payment left to make.

That assumption has already failed for a large and growing share of the population, and nothing has been redesigned around the failure. So this isn’t a housing problem that becomes a retirement problem in thirty years. It’s a retirement problem that’s already happened and hasn’t been named yet.

That’s what a ripple effect actually looks like. Not the first order consequence, which is that houses cost too much and everybody knows it. The second and third order ones, where the instruments we built to carry people through old age turn out to have been engineered for a housing pattern that no longer exists.

The status symbol nobody decided to create

Australia is changing its housing stock faster than most people realise. Federal and state governments have mandated and enabled building taller, and land that once carried a single house can now carry considerably more. We’re moving upwards. We’re learning to live in the sky, which Hong Kong and much of Europe worked out generations ago.

So here’s a signal worth watching. Within twenty years, I think owning a quarter acre block in an Australian capital city will be a status symbol. Not an ordinary thing that ordinary families do, but an unusual thing that marks you out.

That’s a them and us line forming in real time, and nobody’s choosing it. It’s arriving as a by-product of a hundred separate planning decisions, not one of which was about class. Which is how the most consequential social divisions usually turn up. Not announced. Accumulated.

The lease that outlived its reason

Phil and I got onto tenure, and it’s a point I’ve been making for years, so I’ll make it again here.

In Hong Kong, two and three year residential leases are ordinary. In parts of England and much of Asia, tenure is something a renter can genuinely count on. In Australia the standard residential lease is twelve months, rolling. Two years is starting to appear. Three is very unusual, and you’ll have to go looking.

Phil asked me what the thinking behind that is. I told him what I believe to be the truth, which is that there isn’t any. It’s a system that has always run on one year cycles. The original logic, as best I understand it, was the ability to reset the rent annually. That reason has gone. Rent increases are now regulated, so a twelve month lease and a three year lease produce broadly the same income outcome for a landlord.

The reason disappeared. The rule stayed. The law simply hasn’t caught up to one, two, five or ten year tenure, and in the meantime an entire generation of renters can’t plan more than a year ahead of themselves.

Here’s the argument I keep coming back to, and I’d like it on the table properly. Part of Australia’s housing problem is that we don’t offer long term residential tenure at all. What belongs in our housing mix, alongside ownership and ordinary rental, is leasehold tenure of genuine length. Long enough that a household can build a life inside it. Long enough that it can be willed, and passed on to the next generation, the way Singapore already runs it. Owning the bricks was never the point for most people. The secure, ongoing right to use them for as long as a life needs them was always the point, and we’ve never offered it.

That’s not really about leases though.

Every organisation I walk into is carrying a version of a twelve month lease of its own. A rule, a threshold, an approval step, a reporting cycle, a policy written for a reason that has since evaporated, still being enforced because nobody has gone back to check whether the reason is still there. Going through your own inherited rules is the cheapest strategic work available to any leadership team. It’s also almost never done, because it’s unglamorous and nobody has ever been promoted for deleting a policy.

What the brokers were actually asking

I spent part of last week in front of a room of mortgage broker franchisees. They’re a confident group and they’re buoyant about their industry, with good reason, because the numbers above are theirs. But like everybody else right now, they were working through what artificial intelligence and the broader changes around them will mean for their industry and for their own work.

The reasoning behind the question is sound. AI can gather the documentation, assemble the proof, run the numbers, scan the market for the best lender, and do a great deal of the assembly work that used to fill a broker’s week.

My answer to them was the same one I give everybody. That work disappearing isn’t the threat. In this industry it’s close to a gift, because almost none of it was ever the part that mattered.

What matters is the human work nobody has had time for. Knowing that a client is coming to the end of their working life. Knowing there might be another child, or another draw on the income, or a real prospect of earning considerably more in three years. Knowing whether this particular household can absorb a rate movement, in a country where rates are variable and move constantly.

A loan on paper isn’t a loan you can live by. Sometimes the file looks perfect and the life underneath it won’t carry the repayment. No model has ever known that. A person who’s sat across a table from the borrower does.

This is the HUMAND question inside one industry: what’s best done by a human, what’s best done by a machine, and what’s best done by both together. My answer for broking, and for most professions, fits in three words. AI drafts, humans decide. The recommendation stays with the person who has to look the client in the eye.

There’s a trap on the other side of it. Because AI can find you a loan and organise your information, a growing number of people believe they can now do this alone. For a genuinely straightforward situation they might be right. But most people’s finances aren’t straightforward, and almost nobody finds out which category they’re in until after the thing has gone wrong.

The real risk in that room was never replacement. It’s that automation quietly removes exactly the hours that used to build the relationship, the productivity numbers improve the entire time, and nobody notices what’s been lost until three years later when the client book stops renewing.

Trunk, again, and this time it’s yours

Which brings me back to trunk, because the housing story was never really about housing.

Every organisation I work with builds the visible thing and underfunds the infrastructure that makes the visible thing liveable. The subdivision goes in. The sewage doesn’t.

Artificial intelligence is the clearest current example. Organisations buy the model. They announce the model. What they routinely don’t fund is the data plumbing, the governance, the decision rights, the training, the escalation path for when the system is confidently wrong, and the redesigned process on the other side of it. Then they wonder why the estate never became a suburb.

The same pattern turns up in a merger where the org chart is redrawn and the reporting systems aren’t. In a customer platform bought by one executive and run by nobody. In a hybrid work policy with no decision infrastructure underneath it.

Land without trunk is a map. A capability without trunk is an announcement.

Three Things I Recommend You Do

The first thing to do is name your trunk gap, and do it now rather than at some tidy future starting point. Take the largest thing your organisation has bought or built in the last two years and list the supporting infrastructure it actually needs: data, governance, training, process redesign, decision rights, support. Then mark which of those you funded. The distance between the two lists is why your investment is underperforming, and closing it is almost always cheaper than the original purchase was.

The second thing to do is find three rules nobody can explain. Every organisation has them. Approval thresholds, reporting cycles, headcount ratios, sign-off levels, whatever they happen to be in your business. Pick three where nobody currently employed can tell you where the rule came from, and ask two questions of each: who decided this, and does the reason still exist? Keep the ones that survive. Retire the ones that don’t, and retire them loudly, because the point is to teach people that inherited rules are allowed to be questioned.

The third thing to do is decide what your automation dividend is for, before it arrives. If a system is going to give a team back six hours a week, write down now what those six hours might be used for instead. Client relationships, judgment work, thinking time, whatever fits your business. If you don’t allocate it deliberately it’ll be absorbed into throughput inside a month, and you’ll have bought efficiency where you could have bought capability. That decision is far harder to make once the hours have already quietly gone.

The question underneath all of it

There’s one more thing I said to Phil that I want to leave here, because it’s the least popular opinion I hold on this subject.

I’m not convinced that everybody should own their own home.

For a good number of people it isn’t security. It’s an anchor. Thirty years of repayments on an asset they can’t easily move away from, in a country where the work is becoming more mobile, funded by a loan they privately doubt they’ll ever finish. We’ve made ownership the only respectable answer to a question that has several good ones.

What we haven’t built is the alternative that would make those other answers respectable. Real tenure, of the kind I described earlier, long enough to hang a picture, enrol a child and pass the thing on. Build to rent at scale, which is beginning here and is entirely ordinary on the Hong Kong skyline. A genuine mix of ownership, long-lease private rental and institutional rental, so a household can choose the shape that fits its life rather than the only shape on offer.

We need to get out of the mindset that there’s only one way to feel secure inside your own four walls, and that it necessarily involves a mortgage.

We spent thirty years making the mortgage faster and easier to obtain. We’re about to find out whether speed was ever what anybody was buying.

The land is there. It always was. Australia’s housing shortage was never a question of whether we have room. It’s whether we’re willing to build the unglamorous things underneath, in our cities and in our organisations, that turn room into somewhere worth living.

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If this is landing close to home for your organisation, I work with leadership teams and boards on exactly these kinds of decisions: what the signals mean, what the ripple effects are, and what to do before the moment becomes a crisis. Get in touch.

You can also subscribe to my Immediate Futures briefing, a short weekly read on the signals worth paying attention to, written for leaders who want to stay ahead of what’s already arriving.

Choose Forward.

#AustralianHousing #HousingAffordability #MortgageBroking #BuildToRent #ImmediateFutures #RippleEffects #HUMAND #Infrastructure #MorrisMisel #RTHK #MorningBrew #ChooseForward

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Full Segment Transcript – RTHK Radio 3, The Brew, 8 September 2026 ▼ Click to expand

Morris Misel speaking with Phil Whelan on RTHK Radio 3 Morning Brew. Machine transcribed, lightly corrected.

been away flying around the place for the past few days hence we didn't talk last week how you doing? I'm very good happy Tuesday everyone I missed you all. Yes I'm sure you did you're a busy boy how do we make mortgages sound interesting? Well by being excited about the fact that you get into a home at the end of one. Mortgages are not sexy necessarily unless you're involved in the industry but they are absolutely necessary because for most people if we talk about Australia specifically yeah four out of five loans written in Australia now come through a mortgage broker right the very word is very old-fashioned I think that's what we're getting at here isn't it?

Well it is you know I told them the story on stage because you know I love to tell a yarn yeah and it's a true one in this case that in 1995 I needed to renovate the house and to put on quite a few number of bedrooms anyway by the by yeah I needed to do it very very quickly because my wife was pregnant at the time and we were about seven months away from expecting our second child and we had we had anyway a whole lot of reasons we had to move in house hadn't been built had permission for it and I you know the loan was going to take a while because banks were taking a while the industry didn't exist in which is what I told the industry yellow pages which was the place you went to to find people that you didn't know yeah didn't have anybody there was nobody in it I found an article in the age which is a local newspaper and it had an article in the back in the classifieds for somebody called a mortgage broker. That's how old the industry was and my first contact with them. I told them the story of how that's changed over the years from then being in the early days, that very very first attempt where the bank really didn't like the broker, the broker didn't know what they were doing today where most of the banks don't even bother about originating loans anymore. They prefer to go through a third party. That's how far this industry has come in just that space of about 35 years or so.

I suppose the obvious thing is really where it's going next because when I was reading around this morning I'm like it's a 1950s thing. It was it was built for a very different time. So what next? Well it was it was and the reality is that many people now are using loans in a very different way than we did before. A strong reality up till about 15, 20 years ago was that most people in fact only 18% of people over the age of 50 again in Australia 15 years ago still had a mortgage.

That's how small it was because the great Australian dream was to pay off the mortgage really really quickly. Today today 54% of people over the age of 50 still have a mortgage in Australia. 54% and most of those know when the loan ends obviously because it's written for 20 30 years but in their head they don't know if and when they'll ever finish paying it off. Gosh. So it's very very different landscape now to what it was before.

You know what we're going to have to do in another day is get into student loans which still leave people of a certain age older scratching their heads.you're in the top percentile of your country and you spend the life paying for it. Anyway, would you have a day? Yeah, so what happened before? So what we have really in Australia and this is this is you know, this was the comment for them. This was a large room was about three, four hundred mortgage brokers around Australia.

Yeah. Usually of course, I mean the room only contains the best of them. But these these were you know the creme de la creme and we talked about the reality of a mortgage loan still existing into the future. No doubt about it. People will need to borrow money because houses in Australia, I'm sure if we're around the world, but in Australia are just getting uber, uber expensive.

Yeah. Used to be the reality, this statistics and damn lies, but in the 1980s, 1990s a house took about four years of income to pay off. Gosh. Today the equivalent is about 14 years and some probably. Yeah, but that's 14 consecutive years for them and that's you know with nobody else getting the scent out of it.

So if you think about that, it's an impossibility to pay it off within the 30 year loan for most people. So the reality is that finance refinance and all kinds of things is an ongoing chore or responsibility. Now we also don't have enough homes in Australia for people. That's a big thing now. Jag would have talked to you about that.

What is the scent? The simple reason for that in Australia is different in different countries. It is it's different. Firstly, we have a lot of people that come to Australia in a very short period of time. We don't have enough, we physically do not have enough homes for them to live in.

We also in Australia have unfortunately, II think the great Australian dream which is I have to own my own bricks and mortar and I have to live in a freestanding home. And my four wheels. Yeah, exactly. Now that's a great cultural thing to have and I want everybody to have that dream and that reality. But the reality behind that is building physical quarter acre blocks and housing everybody on them takes a lot of real estate and a lot of effort.

It's much cheaper to build apartment blocks which is why Australia has fallen behind. It was easier in countries like Asia, some parts of Europe, some parts of the States where people were used to condos, large buildings. We don't have that culture here. Everybody wants their own little bit of land. So it just…

People were saying, oh Aussie is so massive but so much of Australia was protected and people respect that. And it is and but that's part of the reason. The other one is this funny word called trunk. Trunk is all the infrastructure that's required to make houses work. You need sewage, you need water, you need electricity, you need gas, you need roads, you need public transport.

They're all called trunk. And even though we have lots of land we do not have the trunk that goes out to them. And that's what happens often that somebody will subdivide a piece of farm that's literally an hour and hour and a half out. It'll be called a suburb. We're seeing that happen all the time.

So this will be divided up into quarter acre blocks. It'll be called a suburb but the people there rely 100% on their own transport and the facilities are usually a while away meaning they're 15, 20 minutes away for the nearest supermarket or school or whatever else.It takes a while for that to catch up. So yes, we have the land, the pioneers of old would go out there, but they know that they're sacrificing some of the amenities of a nearby walk-to community that otherwise they might have. And that's part of the reason a lot of the argument, which I don't agree with, talks about migration coming into Australia and the houses that we had were taken up by migrants. I think that's too easy, you know, too easy a blame and not necessarily right.

But the answer is that we are literally, depending on whose stats and lies you have, we are 10 million houses short by the year 2040. 10 million houses if we all continue to want the quarter acre block that we do. And even if we don't, we still have to build 10 million condos or apartments for everybody to feed, to house that population. So what's the answer? I mean, what's the future?

There is a one. The answer is that we have to go with what we're going with now. We have to change our housing stock, which is what we're doing. We are very much moving towards living in condos, living in the sky, so to speak. The governments in Australia, federal and state have all mandated and made possible for us to build taller now and to build on property that once had one home, you can now build something that's much taller.

So we will eventually begin, well, we are already, but soak up more people. It'll become, I think it'll become a status symbol in Australia in the next 20 years to actually own a quarter acre block. It'll really be the them and us. It'll be unusual to have the quarter acre block.People talk about a sort of upcoming saturation point. I think global warming is one of the greatest topics of that.

They reach a sort of crunch point. Is this one of those areas? For us in Australia, housing really is a very big problem. And again, it's not just the housing. It's all that trunk stuff.

It's all about how do we get schools, facilities and the rest. Because you're absolutely right. We have land for days and days. If all it took was a piece of land, we could resolve this. But it's just people that live on that land deserve to have lifestyle.

Toilets flush and electricity that works. Nobody really, very few people I should say, want to go into a housing estate that's a bit iffy on those things. I'm kidding. So it's not going to be as easy as people make out. Stop migration all of a sudden, have a lot more houses.

It's not that easy. And the other thing that I've argued before, and I think we've had the conversation before, is I'm not sure that everybody should own their own home. I think that's an anchor around their neck. How about we just do it slightly different say people should realise that they don't need to? How about that?

Yes. And that's exactly the point. But what we need to do in Australia, which we do not do in any ways, we need to give the equivalent of what happens in England, what happens in parts of Asia. And that is we need to give people tenure. So if they go into a property like a condo or something, that they have the rights to that condo for 99 years, or they have the rights for that for an ongoing period.

Most of our leases, this is why it doesn't work well. Most of our rental leases…Australia are for 12 months reoccurring. So every 12 months you have to go back and ask for an extension. Not one year, two years. That's pretty common here.

It's not here. Two is starting to be three is very, very unusual. You can get them but it's really unusual. What's the thinking behind that Aussie-wise Morris? Because here most people get two or three years.

I honestly don't think there is thinking. It's just a system that's always been system has always been one year cycles. It was always I believe was based on the fact of being able to raise the rent. But that doesn't hold anymore because we have legislated in law now of when rentals can grow up. So even if you take a one year lease you won't be paying the same amount you did when you walked in to when you walk out.

It will have gone up by law's permission. So that doesn't hold up anymore. The law just hasn't caught up with one, two, five, ten years. What did you learn from your mortgage broker guys? I always like chatting with you when you've been on the road.

You talked of undertakers and all sorts of cool professions that we wouldn't think of. They are, aren't they? I think so too. The reality for me was that many of them were worried and concerned the industry would disappear because AI does a whole lot of stuff that they would have traditionally done. It would have brought together all the information.

It would have looked for the best lender. It would have done a lot of that massaging. And what I've said to them is what I say to you and to everybody else, there's still so much human stuff that needs to be done that I actually think AI in this industry is a boon because a lot of it was getting together.documentation, getting together proof, doing numbers, all that stuff that takes a lot of time and effort. And what these people should be doing is really the human stuff of getting to know their clients, getting to know the banks and understanding how best they can serve both of them. The things they can do.

Really, really well. Yeah. Well, the things that they should do because a loan on paper is not really a loan that you can live by. Sometimes it just seems too good, but if you know the person is coming to the end of their working life or is beginning to have, or might have another child, or there might be some other drawer on their income, or they might be able to make more income. Those are really human elements that need to be taken into account.

And also, because our interest rates go up and down, we have this really funny system in Australia where we don't have fixed interest rates. They change every, they change all of the time. But what I said to them was they really need to be in contact with their lenders more often because they need to work with them to understand whether they have the best rates and whether they can do anything for them. So I think there's a whole industry that they're missing out on. What is the future, do you think, of buying a Gaff?

If the mortgage is a 1950s invention with all of its constraints, what do you just, you know, imagine in your head what do you see as the future way? In Australia, it's absolutely still buying because we cannot get rid of that culture. Right. But what we're starting to see here is what's called BTR, which is built to rent, which is what I described before, where a large corporation will build literally a thousand condos, which you're quite used to seeing on the skyline of Hong Kong. We're not.five six buildings built together each housing.

Oh yeah. We're starting to see that in Australia. I think we have to embrace that for a number of people, not for everybody, but to provide the mix of built to rent, of private sector rental, of own your own home and we need to get out of this mindset if there is only one way to feel secure in your four walls and it's not necessarily by a mortgage. It's quite interesting isn't it? A few of the things that you bring up, a few of the things that Morris writes about, check out his writing, morrisfuturist.com.

It's quite interesting that these things have become quite obscure, especially since AI and that's only a couple of years ago, mainstream. Yeah it has but also there's a difficulty like all things with AI that many people think you can DIY this because AI can find you the loan, can massage all of your information but invariably unless it's straightforward it just doesn't work that well. We've got to stop there Morris. Lovely to catch up with you again after a week off and we'll do some more next week. Bye bye for now.

Take care. Yeah that's Morris Miselowski and mate of many years on the brew just chit chatting futurism and

This post is based on my segment with Phil Whelan on RTHK Radio 3 Morning Brew, 8 September 2026.