Tag Archives: South Australia

SA Water Prices and Regulatory Change

Leave a Reply

One of the big announcements in the recent South Australian state election was that the (now re-elected) government would move to de-corporatise the state’s major water utility, SA Water, and establish a new SA Gas and Water Trust. This announcement did not get the attention it deserved, but it could be a significant step away from 30 years of neoliberalism in the governance and regulation of water supply – although whether or not that is a good thing may depend on what replaces this neoliberal corporation.

Background

For much of the last century, water and wastewater in SA was managed by a government department, the Engineering and Water Supply Department. In 1995, the EWS was replaced with a corporatised government business enterprise (SA Water) as neoliberalism swept the world and convinced everybody that government was bad and that a market was the most efficient and beneficial arrangement for the supply of everything, including water.

This corporatised government business was to act like a profit-making corporation in a regulated market where prices are set so the corporation can recover all the costs of service provision. This requires an analysis of the asset base of the corporation and the provision of a guaranteed return on that capital, plus enough revenue to cover operational and other costs. The state government originally set the valuation of the asset base and costs on advice from Treasury, but in 2013 this regulation was taken over by an independent regulator, the Essential Services Commission of SA (ESCOSA).

While neoliberalism sells this model as efficient and the imposition of market discipline, in reality there are inevitable controversies over the subjective pricing of assets and operation costs. As we will see below, these matter to water prices.

This system also puts consumer advocates in an invidious position. Any new consumer protections or environmental initiatives are automatically added to water prices as such operational costs need to be recovered, while consumer advocates need to have a level of technical expertise to assess whether any given capital investment or expenditure is essential or desirable. And if it is, then advocates are trapped into accepting price increases. Alternatively, if limiting price increases is the main goal, they end up having to oppose potentially important capital expenditure or other pro-consumer initiatives.

However, in the context of a proposal to radically change this system, it is worth tracking what happened to water supply and prices under SA Water. This is inevitably a complex and multi-dimensional question, but in this short post I will simply look at what happened to water prices for customers.

Water Prices

Unfortunately, the ABS data for water prices in Adelaide only goes back to 1998, so we don’t have a simple pre-and post- corporatisation comparison. However, as the graph below shows, we can track water and sewerage prices from the infancy of SA Water up to the present, and we can compare this to the general inflation rate. Clearly over the journey, water prices have increased above the general Adelaide CPI, with water price increases 1.3 times higher than the inflation rate.

Line graph comparing Adelaide Water Prices with CPI All groups. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-inflation/consumer-price-index-australia/sep-quarter-2025#data-downloads
Source: ABS, Consumer Price Index, Sept 2025, Table 11.

Of course, correlation is not causation and this the graph says nothing about changes in size of the water and sewerage network, the quality of water or what would have happened if a different regime was in place. More importantly, the graph shows that there were different price trends in different periods, so even the price picture is much more nuanced than the simple 1.3 times inflation rate headline.

In fact, as can be seen, water prices largely tracked with the general inflation rate for the first ten years, and then sharply increased from 2008. A significant part of this was due to major infrastructure investment, including the desalination plant which probably has fewer critics now after years of drought than it had at the time! There was also a major decrease in water prices in 2019, which resulted from a re-valuation of the asset base after a report found that the previous Labor government had over-valued the assets when it handed price control to ESCOSA in 2013. This was obviously a highly politicised process, which could bring in to question the whole “objective” basis of price setting, but either way, the graph shows that it had a significant impact on price trajectories.

Perhaps more interestingly, the graph shows that since 2013 when ESCOSA took over revenue and price regulation, water prices have increased much more slowly – and well under the inflation rate. The one-off adjustment in 2019 skews this data, but even removing that “anomaly” from the data set, water prices have increased by 28.3% since 2013, while the overall CPI has increased by 42.3%. This should be a significant argument for maintaining independent regulation in the new Trust if something like the full revenue-recovery model is to be maintained (i.e. prices set to cover the full cost of service provision).

National Water Price Increases

This conclusion may be reinforced by the national data which shows that since 2013, the rate of Adelaide water and sewerage price increase is one of the lowest of all the Australian capital cities (even without the 2020 revaluation). Indeed, the two cities with the highest rate of price increases (Brisbane and Perth) both have prices set by the state government rather than an independent regulator.

(Adelaide prices adjusted to remove impact of 2020 revaluation). Source ABS, CPI, Sept 2025.

Note though, these comparative figures are only tentative as more research is required on local factors impacting price increases and any changes in the regulatory regimes in what, for other jurisdictions, may be an arbitrary time period. However, the figures certainly make a prima facie case for independent regulation, although again, price in only metric in this issue.

Conclusion

Given all the caveats above, the data and conclusions in this post are not definitive, but the issues raised by the data should be important considerations in structuring water regulation under the proposed new SA Water and Gas Trust. We don’t yet know the details of what is proposed, and given the state government is wanting the Trust to open up development of new housing, we may see a departure from the corporate logic of full cost-recovery. We may also see a limiting of the role of the independent regulator if this regulation is seen as a block to development. However, the price data above suggests some caution would be needed if we have the second without the first, because it was the combination of full cost recovery without independent regulation that saw rapid price increases.

Personally, given my previous critique of neoliberal essential service models, I am open to alternative structures to deliver water. But in considering this, I would want a much better understanding of where the burden of infrastructure and service costs fall under the various alternatives (e.g. on taxpayers or water customers) and what the equity impacts of that would be. And I would expect that data on the track record of SA Water on price, water quality and network provision would also form part of the consideration.

In that context, this post is just a small, initial contribution to that consideration.

Calling Out Older People’s Privilege

As I watch the South Australian state election campaign unfold, I feel compelled to call out older people’s privilege – that is, the leveraging of public funds based on a false sense of need and/or entitlement. Spoiler alert: my argument is that poverty and need among older people is about class, not age – but more about that later!

Unequal sign, with wording "inequality - not what you think"

Old Does Not Equal Poor

I will look at a few examples of older people’s privilege below, but first, the basic data that might question the allocation of concessions and government support based on age (or even receipt of the age pension), rather than on need. I have previously posted that 72% of age pensioners own their own home, and around two-thirds of those homeowner pensioners have more than $100,000 in additional financial assets. Not rich, but not poor either – and those statistics say nothing of the self-funded retirees who are too rich for the age pension.

Overall, the data is clear that there is a correlation of age and wealth as many people with steady jobs accumulate wealth over a life-time. ACOSS/UNSW research shows that the average older household was 25% wealthier than the average middle-aged household, and almost four times as wealthy as the average young household.

And yet, we have policies and proposals to provide government support for older people or households that are not available to other, poorer households.

To be clear, an age pensioner who is renting a house and has only limited savings is going to be facing serious financial pressures and in need of support. But that poverty is about not having property and capital income, rather than about their age. And even then, that pension income remains significantly above the income-support and concessions provided to unemployed people of working age.

Yet lurking at the back of our minds and at the front of the social security system is a very old idea of the deserving and undeserving poor. Older people are assumed to have worked throughout their life and deserve support in their retirement, while working-age people who are unemployed or experiencing waged poverty are somehow to blame for their poverty.

This may change as compulsory superannuation opens the possibility of age pensioners being seen as undeserving losers who did not work hard enough to provide for themselves in retirement, but fortunately, we are not there (yet). And in the meantime, despite the obnoxiousness of the deserving/undeserving politics, older people’s privilege is alive and well. Here are a few examples that have come across my desk in the last few weeks.

Examples of Older People’s Privilege

Stamp Duty Promises

At this state election, the Liberal party is promising to provide a $15,000 stamp duty discount for over 55’s looking to downsize, while Labor is promising to abolish stamp duty for over 60s downsizing to a new-built dwelling. Ignoring the impact on government revenue and the fact that stamp duty overall is an unfair and inefficient tax, these tax concessions (almost by definition) go to people who can most afford to pay stamp duty – because they are getting a significant cash bonus from their downsizing. Young families going from their first home unit to a suburban house are likely to need stamp duty discounts more than an aging downsizer, but older people’s privilege prioritises the needs of age over financial position (albeit dressed up as a wider market intervention to free up supply).

The Older People’s Privilege Lobby

The election campaign platform of the state’s leading advocate body for older people, COTA (the Council on the Ageing) proposes free ambulance services for full age pensioners. Nobody wants a cost barrier to people calling an ambulance when they need it, but this proposal is a claim to older people’s privilege (mediated slightly by limiting it to full age pensioners). Age pensioners already get a 50% discount on ambulance cover insurance and ambulance fees, while people who are unemployed (with no children) and those in waged poverty receive no such discounts.

While COTA is simply lobbying for its constituency, a better public policy would be free ambulance services for all South Australians (a universal service). Short of that, the priority should surely be to extend the existing concession to all unemployed people and those in waged poverty, not an extension of an existing subsidy to aged pensioners.

Similarly, COTA’s call for the removal of the work limit for Seniors Card eligibility would see an older full-time worker in a well-paid job receive free public transport and other discounts, based simply on their age. [1] No consideration of income or need, just a claim for older people’s privilege.

Disclaimer – I am particularly grumpy here because these proposals undermine work that SACOSS did to remove unfairness and poverty premiums in the state concessions system – work that was adopted by the SA government in the 2024-25 state budget.

Propaganda in Other Interests

The final example is not an election policy, but a recent Renew Economy article expressing outrage at a proposal to charge all customers a fixed network cost, rather than the usage-based charges currently in place. While fixed charges are usually regressive, this is less the case than the current system where those with money and housing tenure can reduce their chargeable usage (e.g. by installing solar panels and batteries) and avoid paying any network costs.

For reasons outlined in previous posts, I question the data behind the article’s assertion that the fixed charge proposal takes from the poor and gives to the rich. However, in the context of this post, what is interesting is that the poster child of this injustice is a:

“pensioner in a small cottage home, who makes sure they wear their winter woollies to keep their heating bill down, and always takes short showers and who used their small surplus cash to buy solar to contain their power bill.”

This consumer here is not described simply as a person who owns their own home and has capital invested in solar panels and batteries, they are a (deserving) age pensioner. Yet the distributional impacts of energy network tariffs are mostly about technology and housing tenure, not age – but the age pensioner makes an appearance nonetheless as older people’s privilege is weaponised.

Class, not Age

The reality of all these examples (and a thousand others) is that those with a need for government support need that support because they lack income and wealth, not because of their age. Of course, some older people have low incomes because they are marginalised in the labour market by age-discrimination, but in terms of government supports, this could be equally or better dealt with by reference to employment status than age. And as the stats at the top of this article suggest, many other older households have comfortable incomes and wealth.

Age is simply not a good determinant of wealth or of need. As Piketty made famous, the fundamental driver of inequality is capital accumulation. This is true in the big picture of Piketty, but also in the modest capital of owning a home (or solar power).

When we invoke older people’s privilege to continue to provide (or lobby for) supports based on age rather than need, we are making poorly targeted policy, masking the fundamental inequality of class processes, and perpetuating an antiquated view of the deserving and undeserving poor.

Let’s talk about class (income and wealth) and need, not age.

[1]              The SA Senior’s card is currently available to all residents over the age of 60 who work less than 20 hours per week. There are no income limits.

Gender Equality @ Work – South Australian Data Questions

I have previously highlighted the fact that the gender wage gap in South Australia was (in 2022) significantly lower than the national gap, primarily because of the relatively lower average male pay in SA. I have not tracked the gaps since they, but was made curious again by the recent launch of the Gender Equality @ Work Index Report and a talk I heard from one of its lead authors, Professor Rae Cooper.

The Gender Equality @ Work Index

The Index is much broader than simply the gender wage gap and covers 7 dimensions of workplace gender inequality:

  • Participation – labour force participation and labour utilisation rates
  • Pay – hourly and average weekly pay gap
  • Hours worked – paid and unpaid
  • Stratification – vertical distribution of men and women across workplace levels (including senior executive representation)
  • Segmentation – horizontal concentration of men and women in different industries and jobs
  • Job security & access to leave entitlements
  • Safety – injury rates and sexual harassment at work

I like a good index (hence SACOSS’ almost famous Vegemite Index!), and the Gender Equality @ Work Index is particularly good because of its unique combination of those 7 dimensions (underpinned by 16 different data sets). The result is an index that brings together fairly mainstream but disparate data sources into a snapshot of gender equality at work, but one which also tracks changes over time in key factors driving the broader outcomes.

For instance, as the summary graph below shows, overall gender equality at work has improved over the last 10 years, but progress has been uneven. The biggest improvement has been in stratification (more women entering management and senior positions), while safety has gone backwards and, despite some improvement, segmentation remains a significant problem with the lowest scores in the index.

Gender Equality @ Work Index 2014-2024 Line graph showing trajectory of each of the 7 elements of the index.
Source: Gender Equality @ Work Index Report. Note: the index scores each dimension out of 100, with 100 representing equality and numbers below 100 showing the extend of the gap between men and women.

For me, the inclusion of safety was one of the most important things in the index, while the relative quantification of gender segmentation was particularly useful. I have long heard that Australia had one of the most gender-segmented workforces in the OECD, but the index clearly shows the importance of this in driving overall inequality.

Beyond that, I will let the Index speak for itself (it is an easy read!), although for reasons outlined here, I would have liked to see the gender wage share included in the pay measure. However, indexes are predominantly about changes over time rather than the nuances of their construction, so it is no big issue. And the data did make me go back to the South Australian data, because the Index is only presented at the national level and I wondered if there might be geographical differences.

South Australian Data

I only looked at SA data for a couple of parts of the Gender Equality @ Work Index, participation and pay, and I used slightly different and more limited ABS data sets than those used in the index. In my data:

  • the participation figures are simply the ABS labour market participation rate (without the underutilisation calculation in the Index), and
  • the pay rate is average weekly earnings – total earnings (a different indicator, and without the separate accounting for differences in hourly rates in the Index).

These differences don’t matter much as I was not trying to replicate the Index, but rather to query whether there might be differences in state and national level data.

The two graphs below show the comparison of the national and South Australian data for labour force participation and pay respectively. To match the Index, the gender gap is expressed as a ratio of female to male participation/remuneration, and while there is much greater volatility in the South Australian numbers, there are some clear differences in the national and South Australian trajectories.

In both participation and pay, the national data shows a steady improvement in the female-male ratios over the last ten years. That is, there has been a relatively steady increase in equality in these two dimensions of gendered workplace equality. However, the South Australian data show that momentum towards greater equality here has largely stalled since COVID (2020).

Line graph showing differences in female and male labour force participation rates in SA and nationally from 2014 to 2025.
Line graph comparing gender wage gap (expressed as a ratio of female to male average weekly earnings) in SA and nationally from 2014-2024.

As evident in the first graph above, the participation ratio in South Australia was higher than the national level for much of the pre-COVID period (due partly to declines in the male participation rate in SA from 2014 to early 2017, and again from early 2019 until the COVID recovery). Significantly though, female participation in the SA labour force has not grown much from pre-COVID numbers, and included a large drop in the first half of 2024, hence the ratio in the post-COVID years is mostly lower than the national average.

Similarly, as evident in the second graph, with the exception of the 2024-25 financial year, the pre-COVID improvements in the gender pay ratio in South Australia stalled after COVID. Between November 2020 and May 2024, average weekly earnings for women in South Australia increased by 16.9% and by 16.5% for men (thus basically maintaining the gender pay gap). By comparison, the national figures were a 18.7% earnings increase for women and 12.9% for men, narrowing the gap and increasing the female-male wage ratio.

Conclusion

I don’t have the expertise or resources to replicate the whole Gender Equality @ Work Index for South Australia, but it would seem that there are some potentially significant differences at the state level. This is not to deny the validity or usefulness of the national index and data. However, if the drivers of inequality play out even a little differently in some states, potentially because of different legislation, policy or industry structures, then the Index creators may want to consider state-based indexes as a future expansion of the project.

Of course, that would add complexity in both data analysis and presentation, and one of the strengths of the Index is that it presents key data on complex issues in an accessible way. So there would be pluses and minuses to incorporating geographic differences in the analysis, but even without state data, the Gender Equality @ Work Index is useful as both an educational tool and a policy starting point in addressing workplace inequality.

Silly Housing Stats: the Comparison of Rent Prices and Why It Matters

In previous posts I have highlighted a range of dodgy housing statistics, or the silly misuse of rental data. I argued that the “asking rent” statistics are inflated, unreliable and only capture a small portion of the market. While state government data based on rental bonds is a better indicator of the rent prices for new tenancies, that data says nothing about the rents paid by existing renters – data which itself is rare and unreliable. But there is more at stake in the comparison of rent prices data than just statistical accuracy.

The comparison of rent prices

The table below shows the difference between the data sets on median rent in metropolitan Adelaide in the March quarter this year. Again, the estimates of asking rents are way above the actual median price of new rentals (in the SA Housing Trust data). But those new rental prices are themselves way above the actual median of all rents in Adelaide in the quarter. That median for all renters is represented by the bottom three lines of the table – the first two using and updating the census data from 2021, while the bottom line utilises a recently released rare ABS data set of the base prices in the CPI for private rentals across the state (that is, without public housing and the Commonwealth Rent Assistance, which is usually included and lowers the standard CPI number).

Table showing comparison of rent prices in the different sources for median rent in Adelaide, March Quarter 2025. Core Logic asking rent = $622, SQM = $614, Proptrack = $580, SAHT Bond data = $530, Census (updated) = $487 or $424, CPI private rental = $475.

The table provides pretty clear evidence as to why it is silly to pretend that the price of new rentals is what all renters are paying.

Time Series

Similar patterns and issues emerge when we consider changes over time. Again, the recent ABS data set is particularly useful here because it is focused only on the private rental market. This provides a more accurate comparison of rent prices with the bond data on new private rentals, while the exclusion of CRA enables a direct comparison of market prices (rather than the prices paid by consumers – as in the usual CPI data). The graph below and shows the comparison for South Australia as a whole, but also includes the standard Adelaide rental CPI (which includes public housing and CRA).

Unsurprisingly, the graph shows that since 2020 rents in the private rental market have increased much more rapidly than the standard CPI Adelaide rent figures (which include public housing and CRA). Perhaps more interestingly, the graph also shows that the prices of new rentals (from the bond data) have gone up by more than the Private Rental Market CPI which accounts for existing rentals. The new rental prices are more volatile than the CPI data, and the trend is not uniform – the median price of new rentals increased faster than all rents in the 18 months prior to December 2021, and in most June and December quarters in subsequent years. The gap closed in other quarters, although the overall difference is perhaps under-estimated by the fall in median rent bonds in the March quarter this year – which may or may not be sustained.

Line graph showing comparison of rent prices from June 2020 to March 2025: Adelaide CPI rentals (23% rise), the CPI private rental rise (38%) and the rental bond data for new tenancies (42%).

What the graph does suggest though, is that in the short term the changes in rent prices for new rentals may not be a good reflection of what is happening in the rent market as a whole. Further, in the long term, the focus on new rentals tends to exaggerate the increase in rental prices across the whole private rental market.

What is a stake in the comparison of rent prices

These differences matter. In the previous posts I suggested that the differences in data sources matter because mis-use of data leads to silly statements that detract from the credibility of important advocacy on housing policy. However, the data differences also matter because statistics don’t simply reflect reality (either accurately or inaccurately) – they shape it.

The asking rent data is produced by commercial organisations largely for the use of property interests who are likely to pay for the detailed analysis, so the higher prices in the asking rent data provides good news for their target audience. But more importantly, it inflates landlord expectation across the market. If you are a landlord charging $480 for rent, and then you read stories of median rents of $620 a week, you might feel justified in increasing rents.

Obviously there are objective factors driving some increases in rents (e.g. interest rate increases – a theme I will return to in a future post), but unless we want to pretend that landlords are the rational automatons of first-year neoclassical economic textbooks, we should expect subjective judgements to have a role in economic decision-making. How much of a role is the stuff of economic debates from Marx to Keynes to neoliberalism. But at a minimum, I think it is fairly safe to suggest that having industry analysts advertising data about market rents that are well above the actual median rent is unlikely to help renters.

Silly Housing Statistics: Is it more expensive to rent in Adelaide than in Melbourne?

This is the first of a series of articles on “silly housing statistics”, highlighting how bizarre claims are made with inaccurate or mis-used statistics. We begin with the claim made at the end of January that Adelaide rents had surpassed those in Melbourne for the first time. The story came from housing market analysts PropTrack and was covered in the Advertiser (see below) and elsewhere.

An example of a silly housing statistic - photo of the story from the Adelaide Advertiser, 31 January 2025, headed "Rent costs more here than in Melbourne"

Now I like a “killer stat” – a statistic which sums up an issue and grabs attention for a policy argument. I try to get such stats in most reports I write, but I also try to get the statistics right! So, is the claim about Adelaide and Melbourne rents right?

Turns out, the answer is complicated – and a bit of a primer on housing data.

A Silly Housing Statistic

The PropTrack data says that Adelaide’s median weekly rent in the December quarter of 2024 was $580, although this figure for the “asking” or advertised rent was considerably above the official government data on the median amounts actually agreed and paid – which was $550 per week. (The differences here are discussed further below).

Unfortunately, the official Victorian government data won’t come out until the middle of the year (which is why commercial data like PropTrack gets the headlines!). However, the PropTrack data suggests no change in the Melbourne median rent in the December Quarter – which if applied to the official data from the September Quarter would put the median rent at $560 p.w. – that is, above the Adelaide median.

We might also get a hint of the silliness of the “Adelaide more expensive than Melbourne” claim from another commercial data source. The SQM analysis for mid-quarter (12 November) showed Adelaide median rent at $609 per week, but Melbourne at $627 – both significantly higher than the PropTrack figures, but with Melbourne clearly higher than Adelaide.

But really, all these are silly statistics because the comparison is meaningless without also considering the mix of housing in the data. For instance, if rental houses are more expensive than units, then if one market has a greater proportion of houses than the other, its median rent price will be higher even if the comparable prices are lower. That is particularly relevant here because, at least in the September Quarter, only 40% of Melbourne rentals that quarter were houses by comparison with 55% of Adelaide rentals. That would make the overall median rental in Adelaide relatively higher, even if the rent for particular property types is lower.

Similarly, we would need to add location into the housing mix because if the majority of available rentals are in inner-city locations the median price would be higher than if the majority were in outer suburbs.

A further level of complexity here is provided by the government data for the September Quarter. It shows that Melbourne rental prices for units were significantly above Adelaide prices, but $25 a week lower for a 3-bedroom home. The housing mix clearly matters to the overall average – although it should be noted that the SQM data for September showed both Adelaide house and unit prices significantly below those in Melbourne.

A Silly Endeavour?

It is all a bit messy, and in that sense, the silliness of the Adelaide-Melbourne statistic is as much about making the simplistic comparison in the first place as it is about the conclusion of which jurisdiction is more expensive.

But even if you can sort through the comparison issues, there are also some pretty big questions about the usefulness of the base data.

The sad truth is that, despite a flood of housing data, there is actually no data that usefully gives average rents paid in each city, and no real basis from which we can say which city is more expensive – or more generally, what is happening “for renters”.

Navigating Rents, Rent Prices and Asking Rent Data

The first issue is that, all of the above data is in fact not comparing rents in Melbourne and Adelaide – it is comparing rent prices for new tenancies. But new tenancies are less than 10% of the total rental market (my calculation from SA bond data and 2021 census data). So it is simply a misrepresentation (and a silly housing statistic) to say, as in the Tiser headline, that these numbers refer to “rents”.

That said, there may be good reasons to focus on price of new tenancies. These prices represent the current market price faced by people looking to rent, and it is arguably a lead indicator which other rentals will follow. However, even with this focus, and even if what was being measured was accurately described (which it is usually not), there would still be problems.

There are two key data sources of data on rental prices for new tenancies: official state government data based on rental bonds paid, and the “asking rent” (i.e. advertised rent prices) data which is produced by a range of commercial firms (e.g. PropTrack, CoreLogic, SQM) that scrape real estate sites on the web to produce data and spruik their analytical tools.

As we saw above, there are data differences between the companies even on what the asking rent was, but the asking rents may also not be the price the property is rented at (which is what is captured in the official data). For instance, rent-bidding may mean actual prices go beyond the advertised price, but landlords may also wildly overestimate the rent they can get (the Tiser headline could also have read “Adelaide landlords more optimistic than Melbourne counterparts”!).

Further, web sites like realestate.com.au and the other commercial sources are dominated by advertisements from real estate agents, but real estate agents only manage about two-thirds of Adelaide’s private rental properties. The other third may not be advertised or captured by the web-scraping data, and rents tend to be below the real estate agent’s “market price” (see Census GCP4GADE – Table 40).

The difference between asking and actual rents is clear in the table below. It compares rental bond data for Adelaide metropolitan area for each quarter last year with the SQM asking price data for the week in the middle of each quarter. The SQM data (from their National Vacancy Rate reports) is used because it is well-respected and accessible, but as the table shows, the asking price data is 6% to 17% higher than the median rents actually paid by new tenants.

Data table comparing SQM Adelaide rents with rental bond data for units and houses for each quarter of 2024.

Silly Housing Statistics

So, in summary, the data behind the fairly counter-intuitive claim that Adelaide median rents have surpassed those in Melbourne refers to only a fraction of rents being paid across the market, and is inaccurate even in relation to new rentals because it only relates to advertised prices rather than the rent prices actually agreed and paid.

This makes the headline claim about Adelaide prices surpassing Melbourne a particularly silly statistic – and the media’s uncritical reporting of it even sillier.

However, our beloved Tiser is not alone here. A lot of media and even so-called expert commentary, either blindly or lazily, blurs the differences or makes leaps from asking price to rent prices to rents in general. The result is analysis which is inaccurate, over-generalised or at least questionable given the limitations of the data.

Beware the silly housing statistic.