The problem is that if you own a home and you’ve paid off the mortgage or paid it down over 20 years already then there’s no reason to sell, meaning prices likely won’t fall that much as people will prefer to sit on their asset than to sell at a loss, or at a perceived loss relative to what they were previously told the market would pay for it.

The only mechanism for prices to actually return to earth and make housing affordable again is wage growth and inflation, and the hope that housing prices don’t simply rise alongside wage growth.

Even if you conquer the mountain of ending negative gearing and the insanely generous tax subsidies that investors get, even then you need to wait a decade just to see prices enter a sane rage relative to income again.

Millennials are doomed. Half of them will be renting until they die. The only way out of this trap is to making own 3-10 homes a bad investment. But can you imagine any Australian government decommodifying housing? It’s not going to happen which means a generation of renters and a poverty time bomb when the millennials want to retire.

For people stuck in the renting trap already in their 40s, they’re doomed now and the best idea the intelligentsia have is “maybe just live with your rich parents who sent you to a private school a bit longer and ask them for a loan.”