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economic conditions

Job Vacancies Declined by 30.7%

Posted on by Laze Spasevski
Job Vacancies Down 30.7% From Peak
Job vacancies have declined by 30.7%. This marks a decrease in 10 out of the last 11 quarters, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). Vacancies peaked at a record 474,700 in May 2022, but have since fallen to 328,900 in February 2025, a reduction of 30.7%. “However, despite the falls in job vacancies over the last two and a half years, the total number of vacancies was s...
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RBA Reveals Positive Mortgage Data

Posted on by Laze Spasevski
RBA Reveals Positive Mortgage Data
The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) reveals that “there is positive mortgage data for a vast majority of borrowers. That means, borrowers would remain able to service their debt under a range of plausible economic scenarios”, according to the central bank's latest Financial Stability Review. Crucially, about 97% of borrowers have positive cash flow, which means they’re able to meet their mo...
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How Housing Has Changed Since Covid

Posted on by Laze Spasevski
How prices, rents and rates have changed over the past five years
Five years on from the start of the covid-19 pandemic, the property market is in a very different place, reflecting how housing has changed since covid. When the pandemic started, some banks predicted a crash in property prices. Instead, the national median price fell just 1.7%, before rebounding. By March 2025, the national median was 38.4% higher than in March 2020, according to CoreLogic...
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How Inflation is Affecting the Economy

Posted on by Laze Spasevski
Prices soaring for some items, declining for others
The national inflation rate in January was a moderate 2.5% but prices are changing at different rates and are affecting different parts of the economy, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. On the high side, prices increased by 6.5% year-on-year for education, 6.4% for alcohol & tobacco and 5.3% for insurance & financial services. On the low side, prices rose only 0.9...
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Government Aims to Protect Small Businesses

Posted on by Laze Spasevski
New protections aim to level the playing field between big & small companies
The federal government aims to protect small businesses from unfair trading practices imposed on them by larger companies. The government said, "Treasury will consult this year on the design of protections for businesses, including whether a principles-based prohibition should apply and whether specific unfair trading practices should target small businesses." Unfair practices may includ...
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Insolvency Levels Surged

Posted on by Laze Spasevski
Insolvency Levels Surge
In worrying news for the small business sector, insolvency levels have surged to their highest point in nine years. Insolvency levels in the March quarter were 41.1% higher than the year before and 145.7% higher than the year before that, according to the latest data from credit bureau Equifax. Business owners in the construction and hospitality sectors are doing it particularly tough, b...
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Wages Increased 0.8% in the March Quarter

Posted on by Laze Spasevski
The wages of the average Australian worker increased 0.8% in the March quarter. This takes annual wages growth to 4.1%, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The industries with the biggest annual increases in wages were: Health care & social assistance: 5.3% Electricity, gas, water & waste services: 4.4% Retail trade: 4.4% Transport, postal & warehousi...
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Homebuilding Costs Increased by 40%

Posted on by Laze Spasevski
  Homebuilding costs have increased by nearly 40% since late 2019, according to a speech by Reserve Bank assistant governor Sarah Hunter. Meanwhile, general inflation (referred to as headline CPI in the graph) has been less than 20%. So why have residential construction costs grown twice as fast? Ms Hunter said one reason is that building materials and labour have “risen sharply” si...
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Variable-rate Loans Scaled to New Heights of Popularity

Posted on by Laze Spasevski
Variable-rate loans scaled to new heights of popularity, as demonstrated by the dramatic shift in borrowing trends. In March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, 13.38% of new borrowers chose fixed-rate loans and 86.62% chose variable. But in March 2024, a staggering low of only 1.40% of new loans were fixed, compared to 98.60% variable. This is based on the report by the Australian Bureau of S...
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Commercial Sales Set To Rebound

Posted on by Laze Spasevski
  Commercial sales are set to rebound as transaction activity in the Australian commercial property market appears to be trending up. However, sales activity in 2023 will almost certainly be well down on last year's results. There were $29.2 billion of sales in the office, logistics & industrial, and retail sectors during 2022, according to JLL. Which is considerably higher comp...
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