My twenty-something children are asking for advice on what will happen to the Sydney apartment market. Touchingly, they still assume I might have some clue about the big question bedevilling banks, economists, the government – and the entire property industry.
Is there really a pause? Or will prices keep rising? Or will they fall, perhaps sharply?
For now, my young adult off-springs' interest remains a far more theoretical exercise than a practical matter given the size of a deposit required to buy even a one bedroom, un-renovated flat anywhere near where they grew up.
Even if they did suddenly renounce weekend avocado-smash breakfasts at local cafes or dinners out, it would take considerable time to get together anything like a possible 20 per cent deposit given current prices.
The banks are also taking a much sterner view of the alarming gap between the likely disposable income levels of would-be borrowers and interest rates that can only go up - sooner or later.
Just ask Scott Morrison or RBA Governor Philip Lowe. Record low wages growth means that gap is not going to improve any time soon.
The result means it seems more like going back several decades when first home buyers had to have been conscientious savers and unfailingly polite to their local bank or credit union manager to be allowed to borrow money. These days, even that is not really enough.
Yet the spiralling price experience of the past few years has seared into the consciousness of the twenty-something generation as well as into that of their parents.
So most people in their mid-twenties understand that if they had been of an age to somehow take advantage of the easy money being shovelled into even the most holed borrowers' pockets a few years back, their financial future would look a lot more secure. Alternatively, they could have made an easy profit by selling again relatively quickly.
Instead, their timing was out - only a little in terms of years but a lot in terms of price rises. Now, along with so many of that age bracket, they are wondering how they can ever afford to move from being renters to buyers.
Or whether they should just decide it's all too hard. The government's changes to allow limited access to super for first home buyers can best be described as slow to sputtering.
Not that a sense of timing in the housing market is all bad news, family wise.
Alert readers may recall my astonishment in February at being able to sell a rambling family home now full of spare bedrooms for what would have seemed an absurd sum even a year or two earlier.
Given the house was, ahem, in need of constant, expensive repairs largely due to the lack of such attention over more than twenty years, moving made sense unless I wanted to permanently rent out rooms to tradies.
I belatedly realised, of course, that "downsizing" translated into immediately paying three quarters as much for a quarter of the size by apartment. But that's in a modern, no-fuss building that doesn't leave me anxious about potential leaks whenever there's a decent storm.
Nor do I any longer have to pursue the same intensely personal relationship with a range of roofers, plumbers and electricians. And apartment prices in Sydney are still going up!
Maybe house and apartment prices all around me really will fall again – or at least dramatically slow the pace of going up. How much higher is it possible for them to rise without being impossible to imagine let alone afford? Sometimes, the figures just seem unreal, for older as well as younger generations.
My recently redundant lawn-mower man came on a social visit this week. He lamented he could sell his 40-year old un-renovated semi for more than $2 million but didn't want to live in a small apartment box for almost as much.
The latest quarterly Australian residential survey from NAB says market sentiment fell markedly in the June quarter, along with lower confidence reflecting weaker expectations for house prices and rents.
The survey still varies markedly according to the city and even the area. Melbourne apartments (although not houses) should head down this year, for example, along with Brisbane apartments and the Perth market overall, but Sydney? Apparently not. More than six per cent in a low inflation era means big real rises in real dollars.
But in Melbourne, the fall is expected to be most concentrated in part of the CBD catering to the Chinese student market, for example.
Investor lending in general is also being reined thanks to the banks' new parsimony due to tightening pressure from the regulator. Perhaps ever more fretful regulation will have a compounding impact.
Yet the impact of Chinese investment is still growing, it seems, especially in Victoria. According to the NAB survey, the share of foreign buyers in new Australian property has slightly increased since the first three months of the year from 10.8 per cent to 11.6 per cent. In Victoria, foreign buyers accounted for one in five new property sales in the June quarter.
"Foreign buyers continued to play a role in Australian housing markets in the June quarter despite China's crackdown on capital outflows into overseas property and a raft of new restrictions and taxes on foreign ownership introduced in the 2017/18 federal budget," says NAB chief economist, Alan Oster.
That surge was no doubt accelerated by various state governments, including NSW and Victoria, increasing stamp duty surcharges on foreign buyers from July 1.
But what happens to the market over the months ahead remains a question mark. Many home owners are rushing to sell, ahead of a presumed slowdown.
Who really knows? Not me. Not you either.
