If you don’t already know me, my name is Chris Andersen. I live in Brisbane with my wife Dani and host Beers With Mates on the first Friday of each month at Soapbox Beer. I also used to host a podcast where I regularly sat down with interesting people to hear their story and find out what they had to teach me.
I’ve worked in sales for most of the past decade, mainly in Finance and Real Estate. I started out at Investors Group in Toronto, Canada where I worked as a financial planner. I helped people develop regular saving habits so they could invest in growth assets to help them work towards a comfortable retirement. There’s no compulsory superannuation in Canada so the responsibility lies with the individual and their advisor to ensure they reach their savings and investment goals.
The issue is, Toronto real estate prices were fairly similar in 2015 to Brisbane’s in 2022 and Toronto’s median family income was less than Brisbane’s, so regular families were struggling to make a start in the property market, let alone have money left over for financial planning. I had an opportunity to move into real estate at a company named Scholarhood which eventually become Zoocasa where we helped people buy and rent homes in good school districts. Like in Brisbane, the buyers who prioritised education were generally from cultures who value education, mainly Indians and Asians. These are also the two main cultures we see immigrating to Australia and looking to buy property.
After I left Zoocasa, I worked at Keller Williams as a standalone agent where I had to find all my own leads and develop my own brand. It was then that I first setup this website. My mate, Chris Gostling helped me to create my first marketing program to find buyer clients which combined my disciplines of financial planning and real estate. I wanted to check from a financial planning perspective that maxing out your mortgage to buy your principal property would also allow you to retire at a reasonable age. I used an online software program that was free at the time called ES Planner to build the model for the financial plan that sat in the background. The below video shows the comparison between the rent vs buy scenarios.
When I built the financial planning model, I had to make assumptions about:
Income Growth
Expenses Growth (including mortgage / rent)
Inflation
Investment Growth (for the remaining savings)
House Price Growth
I was conservative on all fronts and it turned out that the purchase scenario worked out far better in the long run, mainly because rent goes on forever while a mortgage only lasts 25-30 years and then you have an asset you can sell if you downsize in retirement or bequeath to your family at death.
Now, two things have happened since I made this content in 2016 and I’m sure they’re not news to anyone in Canada or Australia. House prices went up far more than expected, especially after 2020 in Australia, and interest rates also went up over the last few years, although we haven’t seen prices drop in Brisbane. Neither of those were part of the model.
I was lucky enough to go back into real estate in 2020 here in Brisbane at Pure Real Estate and I created another piece of marketing content which analysed real estate price growth for every suburb in Brisbane between 2011 - 2021, as below. During my two years at Pure, I mainly helped investors cash out of their investment properties. Many units and townhouses were not good investments from a capital growth perspective until after the end of 2020 so I was able to make the most of this growth period. From a housing perspective, this investor stock was now being purchased by owner occupiers as affordability became more of a concern, which also put more pressure on the rental market. These trends are seen in more detail in the below video.
After creating this analysis for Brisbane, it made me curious to see how the same 2012 - 2022 period looked in Toronto so I wrote this report which showed that units and townhouses had experienced far more growth in Toronto, likely because of affordability issues for detached houses. At the same time, properties in the 905 grew faster than in the 416. In other words, capital growth was higher in the outskirts than the inner city, most likely also because of affordability. Toronto (416) is shown in white below while the larger surrounding area is 905. Even though most of the employment is in Toronto, people were willing to buy further away and commute, if necessary. As we now know after Covid, many people can now also work from home.
This could be the equivalent of the area made up by the space between Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Toowoomba here in Queensland, as below.
In 2022, I moved to Ray White Bulimba where I had access to more training and was able to work with more experienced sales agents. As a national business, Ray White also gave me access to more data, so I could assess affordability from a national perspective.
I wrote a report comparing Brisbane to all the other capital cities over the FY2009 - FY2023 period as well as another report comparing Brisbane to other cities in South East Queensland like the Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast and Toowoomba. I also considered growth in the areas where I sold and marketed - Coorparoo, Camp Hill, Morningside and Murarrie. Since I was inner city focused, I also wrote a report analysing the units and townhouse market from an affordability perspective.
Now that I’ve left sales, I work as an Assistant Development Manager at Atrio Property and we mainly focus on helping developers with their subdivisions on the outskirts of Brisbane in places like Ipswich, Ripley and Bahrs Scrub. This allows me to continue to focus on affordability, although I’m now helping to create the properties rather than sell them.
Oh, and if you want to see how property returns have compared to financial markets, you can read this report or listen to my first mentor, Marcel von Pfyffer, explain financial markets and global geopolitics in more depth in our podcast chat from the end of 2023.
I enjoy writing these reports and doing all this analysis because I used to be a Management Consultant in KPMG’s Economics Team in Brisbane before I moved to Canada in 2013. Now, I write less reports but work more directly with clients and consultants in my role in development management at Atrio Property.
If you’d like to have a chat about any of the above, feel free to shoot me a message on 0424 682 636 or email me at chris.andersen@atrioproperty.com.au