Property prices are falling but there are no winners in a downturn

For the past decade, there was seemingly one story and one story only to be told about Australia’s property market and it went something like this: a young couple, usually from Sydney or Melbourne, starts saving to buy a house but struggles to keep up with skyrocketing prices.

They attend auction after auction, but are out-bid by baby boomer and overseas investors, who are amassing huge property portfolios to diversify from stocks, or, in some case, simply get rich and retire early.

Related: House prices keep dropping – and there's no end in sight | Greg Jericho

For the past two decades, give or take the odd correction, it’s been the same tale of rising prices and increasingly locked-out first homebuyers.

And so it was the case in my own working-class, albeit gentrifying, suburb where the call of auctioneers became the soundtrack to my Saturday mornings, as 30 or 40 people would compete kerbside to “win” a $1m mortgage for a house that needed work. Younger buyers, watching aghast, couldn’t get a bid in unless their parents stumped up extra cash from the auction sidelines.

It was the age when consultants flogged cheap apartments under the guise of “free” property seminars, and spruikers wrote books about how to buy 10 homes before you retire, which inevitably included a chapter on millennials spending too much money on smashed avo and drop-in yoga classes.

And then, somewhere during the course of 2018, the tide definitively turned. The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority tightened lending standards, overseas investors became skittish, and prices started falling, gradually at first, but now at a rate that’s surprising even housing wonks.

Ratings agency Moody’s has just forecast that Sydney house prices will drop by 9.3% this year, revised from its January prediction of 3.3%. It’s a similar story in Melbourne, with Moody’s original January forecast of a 6% decline updated most recently to an 11.4% fall this year. The Reserve Bank, most recently, warned that more than 3% of Australian homes are in negative equity.

And what now of first-home buyers’ prospects? Are they finally nudging out investors and buying up the houses?

Not quite.

While the level of first homebuyers in the market is at a six-year high and properties are obviously less expensive than they were two years ago, it is still far from cheap to buy or secure a mortgage in metropolitan Sydney or Melbourne. In fact, an analysis of data by Ernst and Young has found that home owners in Sydney would have been more than $600,000 better off over 10 years if they had kept on renting and put a 20% deposit into a leveraged ASX200 fund instead.

The decade-long story we have been told about our property market is built on a series of misleading assumptions: that property is the best and most secure path to attaining wealth; that millennials are fussy and have no cause for complaint; that the boom period will go on forever because the property market, unlike volatile stocks with their shorter run cycles, are as safe as houses.

Related: Australian house prices down in every capital city except Adelaide and Hobart

We have also become a nation that views the homes we live in as an investment, but, one in which, oddly, downturns cannot reach. Now the curtain has been pulled back, it’s clear that property is not some special investment class where the usual risks don’t apply. Buy 10 properties by all means, but be prepared to take responsibility for the losses as well.

Granted, the narrative is changing. People who bought six or seven properties on average wages are no longer held up as shining examples of entrepreneurship and admirable derring-do, but as ticking financial time bombs saddled with huge debt.

Naturally, you may expect millennials to relish this moment. It’s their chance, perhaps, to claim some ground in the inter-generational property war, which has favoured investors through tax breaks.

But it’s pointless.

The truth is no one wins when you live in a society that amasses homes like trophies, refuses to take any responsibility for risk, and expects the good times to keep rolling in.

• Johanna Leggatt is a Melbourne-based journalist