Article: Housing remains in the too hard basket at budget time

Housing remains in the too hard basket at budget time
http://blog.rpdata.com/2011/05/housing-remains-in-the-too-hard-basket-at-budget-time/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RPDataResearchBlog+%28RP+Data+Research+Blog%29

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Once again, some of the key issues affecting virtually every Australian have not been addressed in the Federal Budget. Housing supply, and associated with that, housing affordability has again flown under the budget radar.  Is it simply that politicians don’t know how to deal with the issues of land undersupply or is that they don’t have the ability?

The housing market is broadly addressed in Budget Paper 1 on page 2.20:

Dwelling investment

Households also remain cautious with respect to their dwelling investment decisions, with tighter credit conditions further weighing on activity in this sector. In the short term, forward indicators are pointing to continued weakness, with housing finance for new dwellings and dwelling approvals falling in recent months. In the medium term, demand for housing is expected to be supported by low unemployment, solid growth in household incomes and past strength in population growth. However, ongoing supply constraints associated with planning and approval processes and land release restrictions are expected to continue to weigh on dwelling investment growth.

So, it’s clear they acknowledge the problem but there is little action.

The key points relating to the property market in the budget were:

• Migration set for an upswing – new target is 185,000, up from 168,700 the year before
  • Mostly focused on regional areas where workers are desperately required
  • Higher population growth means higher demand for housing – the flip side is that the Government continues to ignore the fact that as a country we are not building enough homes to accommodate current rates of population growth, nor are we delivering these homes at affordable price points and with sufficient local infrastructure and amenities.
• $6 billion allocated to a regional infrastructure fund – most of this will be directed towards projects in Queensland and Western Australia to support the resources sector
• The ‘Housing and Community Amenities’ provision in the budget has been cut by $1.1b reflecting the conclusion of the housing initiatives introduced as part of the Government’s response to the global financial crisis..  This is primarily related to a reduction in social housing initiatives that were part of the Nation Building and Jobs Plan

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Article: Future of the office is up in the air as pace of change speeds up

Future of the office is up in the air as pace of change speeds up
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/business/future-of-the-office-is-up-in-the-air-as-pace-of-change-speeds-up-20110506-1ebwq.html

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Article: Real estate's advertising methods on display

Real estate's advertising methods on display
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/business/real-estates-advertising-methods-on-display-20110505-1e9d7.html

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There was something rather peculiar about the big display advertisements in this morning’s newspaper for the new Penfolds releases: they were priceless.

“Nobody beats Dan Murphy’s”, trumpeted Woolworths over the usual mulberry prose with espresso highlights used to describe Penfolds’ “icon” wines. A couple of pages over and “We beat everyone’s liquor prices” promised 1st Choice Liquor Superstore (aka Coles, aka Wesfarmers) amid masses of dark fruit and a jolt of spine tingling tannin.

But nowhere on those four big pages of display advertising was the price for the stylish 2007 St Henri, the more robust 2008 RWT nor the immensely concentrated Bin 707. Funny that. Could Australia’s dominant retailers be going to the opposite extreme of the dreaded price signalling by not pricing at all?

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It is no doubt entirely coincidental that the two big players should both decide not to advertise the price each promises to beat on the major wine release event of the year. Purely coincidental.

Worse though than the unadvertised price is the advertised price that isn’t – a practice rife and apparently unchallenged in real estate.

“Above $700,000” means “$750,000 will be considered”. “More than $500,000” means “we’re running an unofficial auction with a reserve of $540,000”.

In my opinion, it’s simply misleading, a way of suckering in would-be buyers, leading them into a price range they otherwise wouldn’t consider, hoping to catch their emotions and, in a vendor’s perfect outcome, running an auction under the guise of private treaty.

It effectively gives the real estate agent the best of both the auction and private treaty worlds – an illusion of price certainty to attract buyers, plus the potential for competitive bidding.

While the real estate databases keep tabs on the level of discounting from the advertised price for private treaty sales, the ramping of prices goes unmeasured and unchallenged.

Consider visiting a supermarket where milk is priced at “above $1” and arriving at the cash register to find the price is actually $1.25. Consumers wouldn’t wear it and the ACCC would perhaps lumber into action. But for the biggest purchase of most people’s lives, it’s apparently acceptable.

It took years of complaints to get a little action over agents overestimating to vendors and underestimating to buyers in official auctions, but the more blatantly dodgy advertising of private treaty properties remains unchallenged. It wastes home seekers’ time in inspecting properties that are out of their price range and makes the market more opaque when transparency is the ideal.

Or maybe real estate should be advertised like the apparently priceless 2008 RWT shiraz: “Intensely aromatic with blackberry/elderberry/praline aromas and roasted chestnut notes. The palate is rich, smooth and compact with generous blackberry/dark chocolate/liquorice flavours, plentiful savoury tannins and vanilla/toasted oak notes. It finishes chalky firm, long and minerally.”

No, you can’t make that sort of stuff up  - but if you can fit all that in a 750 ml bottle, imagine what you could do with an entire house on a quarter acre.

Michael Pascoe is a BusinessDay contributing editor known to imbibe reds, cheeky or otherwise.

To find out more checkout my blog at Jason Rose

Article: Gen Y More Likely To ‘Bet the House’ to Fund Business Venture

Gen Y More Likely To ‘Bet the House’ to Fund Business Venture
http://blog.aussie.com.au/geny-business-venture/

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Article: Checks and Balances in Ranking Signals

Checks and Balances in Ranking Signals
http://searchenginewatch.com/3642101?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sew+%28Search+Engine+Watch%29

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Google continues to introduce new sources of social signals at a rapid rate. The newest signal is the +1 button, a signal that some are calling their answer to Facebook.

Well, maybe, but I think there is much more to it than that. This is also Google’s latest move to reshape their ranking algorithms.

If we go back to the dawn of the modern search engine era, Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s thesis became the basis of the first successful commercial search engine based on citation analysis. The form of the citation worked beautifully, it was links.

The system was brilliant, because people only linked to stuff that they really liked. After all, a link might take traffic away from my site, so why would I link to something unless I thought it was good for my visitors, and that it would then reflect well on me?

As we all know the great spam attack followed, and an ongoing battle between Google and the spammers has followed. Google gradually made some progress, with most of the major firms who sell links exiting that business.

However, in the process, the original value of those citations lost some of its luster. Links no longer have the same degree of value as a citation source that they used to. They still are a valuable data point, but what was needed was a system of checks and balances.

The search for these has been ongoing for quite some time. By now Google has assembled an impressive list of alternative signals:

This is not to mention that they can monitor user behavior on the search results themselves. For example, if someone clicks on a search result and spends only 3 seconds there before bouncing back and clicking on a different result, that isn’t good. To this impressive array of signals, we now add the +1 feature.

The fascinating thing about all this is that it provides a marvelous system of checks and balances.

Spammers can continue to try and game the link side of the equation. They can find out how to buy links that Google can’t identify. They can build sites that use shady link building practices, and operate under Google’s radar.

But, it will be to no avail if your social signals don’t compare well with that of your competition.

Or, the spammer can choose to game one or more sets of social signals by one means or another. They can hire a bunch of people on Mechanical Turk to go spend an hour on their site and view 25 pages, make sure that they have the Google Toolbar installed, and make sure that they have Google Analytics on the site, right?

But what if the link data isn’t there to support that?

Gaming all the signals that we can identify may not even be enough, even if a spammer could afford it. After all, what are the signals that we can’t put our fingers on that Google has access to?

The cost of cheating just keeps going up and up, and figuring out how to do it gets harder and harder. The industry has speculated for years what Google would do to supplant or supplement links as a ranking signal. Now a clear picture is emerging.

A wide ranging network of social behavior signals will be a big player in the equation. These signals won’t supplant links entirely. Links will remain a huge factor, but there will also be a clear system of checks and balances.

The Google Panda update was the first major step towards putting these signals into action, and Google clearly likes the outcome of that effort. Panda is the first step in reshaping the way ranking algorithms work at Google. And, it is certainly only a first step.

Links won’t become a non-factor or a small factor. They are here to stay. Citation analysis, in a sense, is alive and well, it just comes in many different forms now.

To find out more checkout my blog at Jason Rose