End of the September month and quarter is going to bring a slew of interesting data my recent malaise. Veteran Rick Carr at HTW kicked it off with his now bi-monthly CairnsWatch which included rental vacancies to August broken down by units and houses:

Source: HTW CairnsWatch

This is a rent roll survey by HTW Cairns survey while the data frequently referenced here from SQM in previous posts is scraped from online data. Rick has been doing this a long time and knows his stuff on property. I recall subscribing to a previous hardcopy version of these reports then via a JCU unit way back around 1994.

However the balanced band here needs to be revised down. If you are an investor and the trend pushes through the 4% mid-point on that balanced band you are either too early or too late. This isn’t unusual for Cairns veterans like Rick and Bill Cummings who frequently anchor themselves to historical metrics past their use-by-date. Cummings does this with population growth rates.

Never mind. SQM today released a new beta data series of weekly rental listings also broken down by units and houses. This is postcode 4870:

Louis Christopher at SQM has also suggested we should be wary of directly relating this listing series to a vacancy rate. The RTA rental bond date for the September quarter should be due in the coming week or so.

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