You can’t analyse the 18.6-year cycle using short-term data. Yet most real estate indexes only go back a few decades to the time when transactions started to be recorded digitally. Some analysts have delved through historical archives to laboriously extract a longer series of data for various regional areas. However, the one thing I want to tell you about today are the charts spanning 350 years of housing data. The Oldest Housing Index That makes it an extremely valuable docu

The core to learning the mechanics of the 18.6-year land cycle is fully understanding the role of economic rent (unearned income) and rent-seeking in the economy. This is the ‘free lunch’ that so many desire — and the rights to which are protected by the elite at all costs. Throughout the cycle, the greatest economic gains always come from owning the rights to land. However, rent-seeking can take on many forms. Cast your minds back to the taxi licencing monopoly, for example.

In the 1880s, Judge James G Maguire of the Superior Court of the city and county of San Francisco gave a speech to the New York Anti-Poverty Society. He said: ‘I was one day walking along Kearney Street in San Francisco when I noticed a crowd in front of a show window…I took a glance myself, but I saw only a poor picture of an uninteresting landscape. Source: henrygeorge.org [Click to open in a new window] ‘ As I was turning away my eye caught these words underneath the pictu

You’ve no doubt heard of the investment company Blackstone. They’re a behemoth in the world of investment and finance. With more than $730 billion in assets under management, the firm is a force to be reckoned with. They’ve got their fingers in a lot of pies, from private equity to real estate to hedge funds, and they’ve been gobbling up assets and real estate over the years at a breakneck pace. Most recently, Blackstone has also been eyeing up the Australian land market. Fro

I had an interesting question from a Cycles, Trends & Forecasts subscriber this week. Take a look: ‘ Catherine, I bought my house here in South Melbourne in October 1981. ‘ It cost me $ 55,000, a 2 bedroom weather board, north yard, free standing with side gateway, all in good order. ‘ I could sell it today for about $1,300,000 $55,000 subtracted from $1,300,000 leaves the sum of $1,245,000.  ‘ Is this sum what you mean by economic rent, I was sleeping a third of that time.

I want to pay tribute to Dame Vivienne Westwood, who passed away at the age of 81 on 29 December. Her passing received wide media coverage. The global icon was responsible for bringing modern punk and new wave fashion into the mainstream, helping launch and clothe the Sex Pistols, and having a tremendous influence on how thousands of men and women dressed throughout the years. However, Westwood was, at heart, an activist. In her autobiography, Vivienne Westwood , written with

Roy Wenzlick is possibly the greatest housing market forecaster of all time.  He did an immense amount of research on the real estate cycle and is renowned for his forecasting abilities.  However, unlike Homer Hoyt (who is credited for ‘discovering’ the 18-year boom/bust pattern as it applied to land in his 1933 book One hundred years of land values in Chicago ), Wenzlick doesn’t get a mention on Wikipedia. In fact, it’s incredibly difficult to find Wenzlick’s publicatio