Housing is dominating headlines. Treasury’s defending its tax modelling. Economists are warning about supply. Most of the commentary is built on one number: the national median house price.
OpenCorp CEO Cam McLellan unpacked why that number is misleading on The Bond Report earlier in September, where he explained that at OpenCorp, we don’t make investment decisions off headline numbers. We make them off 19,000+ hours of research a year into what’s actually happening on the ground, suburb by suburb, corridor by corridor.
Here’s why that distinction matters.
There’s no such thing as “the Melbourne market”
A capital city isn’t one market. It’s dozens of markets stacked inside each other.
“The rings around the city are individual markets,” Cam told Caleb Bond. “More expensive in the inner, going outwards. There’s also growth corridors that have come in over the last 15 years around the activity centres. They’re individual markets too.”
That’s the concept OpenCorp calls markets within markets. When national or city-level modelling gets reported as a single figure, it smooths out everything from a $3 million inner-city renovation to a $550,000 townhouse on the fringe. The average might be accurate. It won’t tell you what’s happening in the specific pocket you’re looking at.
Growth corridors: where the opportunity actually sits
Growth corridors are the areas that have opened up around new infrastructure and activity centres, new train lines, new schools, new town centres.
This is where OpenCorp’s research team spends most of its time: tracking land supply, building starts (not approvals, there’s a real difference), infrastructure rollout and demand across every growth corridor in the country. Right now, the affordable end of the market, where most first home buyers and everyday investors need to be, is undersupplied. Not slightly tight. Genuinely short.
Not sure what’s happening in your target area?
This is exactly what our research team maps out for every client, before you commit to a property.
Why median price figures mislead investors
Median price is popular because it’s simple: one number, one headline. But a single blended figure can shift for reasons that have nothing to do with what’s happening to property values where you actually want to buy. The numbers include affordable housing with top end luxury housing. As Cam puts it plainly “I don’t really care if gazillionaires are selling their penthouse apartments for a tad less and then re-buying again, and you shouldn’t either. But these sales impact the median price”
That’s also why comparing a couple of months of headline data against modelling built for a multi-year horizon doesn’t hold up. Different timeframes, different questions. Neither tells you what’s happening in your growth corridor. Only proper research does that.
Invest with data, not headlines
This is the gap between how the housing debate gets discussed publicly and how OpenCorp clients actually invest. National headlines won’t tell you whether building starts are keeping pace with population growth in your target area, or whether infrastructure is landing this year or in five.
Our strategies are built on that level of detail, which is part of why OpenCorp clients have outperformed the capital city average by $254K since 2006.
The bottom line
- One city is not one market
- Growth corridors are where the real undersupply is
- Median price is a headline number, not a strategy
- Building starts matter more than approvals
Stop investing off headlines. Start investing off data.
Ready to invest with data, not guesswork?
National headlines won’t tell you what’s happening in your growth corridor. Our research team will.
Talk to an OpenCorp property investment specialist about what’s really happening on the ground in the areas that matter to you.
