A conversation with Gerard Burg, Economist at Cotality
Property, Straight Up Podcast with Warwick Brookes
The headlines and the data do not always tell the same story. That is one of the first things you notice when you sit down with someone who genuinely lives inside the numbers. Gerard Burg, an economist at Cotality (formerly known as CoreLogic), spends his days translating vast streams of property data into clear, actionable signals for lenders, agents, investors and the broader public. With a background spanning nearly two decades as a macroeconomist at National Australia Bank, Gerard brings a rare combination of big-picture economic thinking and granular property insight to every conversation.
Warwick sat down with Gerard to cut through the noise and get to the real signals shaping Australia’s property market right now, from Melbourne’s underperformance narrative to the housing supply crisis, the impact of negative gearing reform, and what the Reserve Bank’s next move might mean for buyers.
Who Is Cotality and What Do They Actually Do?
Many people in property circles are still getting used to the name. Cotality was formerly CoreLogic, a brand that carried enormous recognition across real estate, banking and valuations in Australia. The rebrand was a decision driven from the company’s American headquarters, with the new name designed to communicate the breadth and depth of what the organisation does.
As Gerard explained, the name breaks down into three ideas: the cooperative relationships Cotality holds with industry partners, the totality of coverage across the entire property market, and the vitality with which it brings raw data to life. Sitting behind an enormous amount of property research and analytics used by major banks, valuers, agents and lenders every day, Cotality is, as Gerard puts it, often seeing behavioural shifts and market movements before the broader market even realises they are happening.
That advantage comes from an extraordinary volume of data flowing into the organisation from valuer general departments, real estate agents, lenders and other sources across the country. A specialist team of data scientists processes and cleans that raw material, surfacing the clearest possible signals so Gerard and his colleagues can communicate genuine insight rather than noise.
Headlines vs Reality: The Melbourne Story
Few markets have attracted more media attention in recent years than Melbourne. The narrative has been consistent and often bleak: Melbourne has lost its crown, it is underperforming, it is uninvestable. Gerard is measured but clear about the gap between that framing and what the data actually shows.
The reality, he argues, depends entirely on who you are. For investors holding property in other capital cities and watching Melbourne lag behind in price growth, the negative characterisation might feel accurate. But for a first home buyer, Melbourne tells a very different story. The same market that investors have been criticising is one where purchasing power goes significantly further than in Brisbane, Perth or Sydney. The affordability advantage is real, and it is not small.
What is more, the investor picture is more nuanced than the headlines suggest. Investor share of lending in Melbourne has been trending higher, even if it still sits below the national average. The idea that Melbourne is simply uninvestable has, in Gerard’s view, been somewhat overstated relative to where the numbers actually are. The recent federal budget changes around negative gearing and capital gains tax now add further complexity, and their effect on the investor landscape across Australia will take time to show clearly in the data.
Why Adelaide Overtook Melbourne, and Whether It Will Last
One of the more striking developments in the Australian property market over the past few years has been Adelaide surpassing Melbourne in median dwelling values for the first time in history. For many observers, this seemed almost unthinkable given Melbourne’s size and economic weight. Gerard attributes it to a relatively straightforward supply and demand story, though the dynamics behind it are instructive.
Victoria, and Melbourne in particular, delivered an exceptionally high volume of new housing stock between early 2020 and mid 2024. Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that roughly one third of all homes completed nationally over that period were located in Victoria. There was also a strong bias toward standalone houses, reflecting an enduring preference among buyers for the traditional home with a backyard. That supply kept a lid on price growth in a way that simply did not occur in Adelaide.
Adelaide, by contrast, experienced a significant reversal of its longer-term demographic trend during the pandemic. Where it had historically been a city people left, particularly younger workers moving east for opportunity, the pandemic years brought a meaningful inflow of residents. Supply was inadequate to absorb that demand, and values rose sharply as a result.
The key question, of course, is whether this represents a lasting realignment or a temporary distortion. Gerard is inclined toward the latter. Adelaide is a city of around 1.5 million people. Greater Melbourne is pushing above five million. The scale difference is significant, and Melbourne’s affordability advantage relative to Sydney and Brisbane may well draw increasing numbers of new residents over the next five years, providing a demand tailwind that could see Melbourne reclaim its position in the rankings over the longer term.
The Housing Supply Crisis: Why Building More Is Harder Than It Sounds
Australia’s housing shortfall has become one of the defining economic and social policy challenges of the era. Federal and state governments have set ambitious targets. The reality on the ground is considerably more complicated.
As Warwick and Gerard discussed, the cost of construction has risen sharply. Trades are in short supply, drawn to large scale government and commercial projects that offer more reliable work. Development margins have been squeezed to the point where many projects simply cannot be made to stack up financially. Gerard notes that the cost of building a home has converged across major capital cities, meaning the affordability advantage Melbourne offers buyers does not extend to developers and builders, who may find projects in Brisbane or Sydney more financially viable given higher end values.
This creates a paradox. The very conditions that make Melbourne attractive to buyers on affordability grounds are the same conditions that make new supply harder to deliver. If demand picks up significantly in Melbourne, as many expect it will, the constrained ability to add to housing stock becomes a meaningful floor beneath any potential price decline, and eventually a driver of upward pressure.
Warwick raised a concern that resonates across the development sector: the government’s ambition to deliver new housing at scale, particularly through the activity centres zoning program, is placing new stock predominantly 40 to 50 kilometres from the CBD. The evidence suggests many buyers, particularly younger Australians, want to live closer in. If that mismatch persists, new supply will not flow where demand is strongest, and rental pressure in inner and middle ring suburbs will continue to intensify.
Apartments, Losses and the Melbourne CBD Story
The performance of Melbourne apartments, particularly newer high-rise stock, has been a source of considerable concern and confusion for owners, investors and advisers alike. Gerard’s data provides important context.
The losses that have been widely reported are real, but they are geographically concentrated. The Melbourne CBD stands out as a particularly stark example: unit values there peaked in approximately March 2017 and have broadly declined since. Nationally, holding a property for around ten years typically produces a strong outcome in terms of capital growth. In the Melbourne CBD, that rule of thumb does not apply over the same period.
What connects the underperforming pockets, including parts of Port Phillip and Stonnington West, is rapid supply growth. Apartment developments by their nature add stock in large, concentrated volumes over short timeframes. When that supply outpaces the market’s capacity to absorb it, values suffer. Warwick added important local context here: planning changes from around 2017 onwards significantly increased what was permissible in many suburbs, and in some areas along major roads and activity corridors the volume of new apartments delivered was simply far greater than underlying demand could support.
The forthcoming activity centres zoning reforms, which will further expand apartment development rights across Melbourne, raise legitimate questions about whether that pattern will repeat in new locations.
Gentrification, the West, and Where the Growth Opportunities Lie
Despite the challenges in some segments and locations, Gerard sees genuine opportunity in parts of Melbourne that remain comparatively undervalued. The mechanism he points to is one of the most consistent forces in urban property markets: gentrification.
He notes that Richmond and Fitzroy, now among Melbourne’s most desirable and expensive suburbs, carried a very different reputation not many years ago. The same gradual process of rising amenity, increasing demand and value uplift continues to work its way through Melbourne’s middle ring suburbs, particularly stretching from the north through the west. Suburbs like Footscray are cited as examples where comparative affordability and proximity to the city may be undervalued relative to their eastern equivalents.
For buyers with a long enough time horizon and comfort with a neighbourhood still in the earlier stages of that cycle, the data suggests these areas represent some of the more compelling value propositions available in Melbourne’s current market.
Negative Gearing and Capital Gains Tax: What Comes Next?
The federal government’s changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax treatment for investors were among the most significant property policy shifts in years. At the time of this conversation, the changes were fresh and the data was still catching up.
Gerard was cautious about drawing firm conclusions from the immediate post-announcement period. Cotality observed that the first weekend of auction results after the announcement showed relative softness in Sydney, Australia’s most active investor market, alongside some relative strength in Melbourne, where first home buyer activity is more prominent. But he was clear that this was not a reliable signal. The sample was too small and the time too short.
The more definitive picture will likely emerge through hard data on investor borrowing activity, which carries a significant lag. Gerard and his team are working to surface early signals as quickly as possible, but the honest answer is that meaningful conclusions will take months to emerge. What he does say with confidence is that overall investment activity is likely to be discouraged by the policy settings, and that the specific requirement for investors to purchase new builds if they wish to retain concessional tax treatment introduces its own set of distortions, particularly around pricing and the feasibility of inner ring rental supply.
Interest Rates, Borrowing Capacity and the First Home Buyer Squeeze
Interest rates have been a defining theme across the Australian economy for several years, and the property market is no exception. Gerard points to first home buyers as the segment most acutely sensitive to rate movements. With tighter budgets, earlier stage careers, and borrowing capacity that contracts with each rate rise, first home buyers feel the impact more directly and more quickly than established owners or investors.
The federal government’s expanded first home buyer deposit scheme, which allows eligible buyers to enter the market with a five per cent deposit, has provided genuine support. But Gerard notes that its effect appears to be fading as the third rate rise of the year lands. The Reserve Bank of Australia meets regularly to assess monetary policy, and at the time of this conversation, Gerard’s view was that a hold was the most likely outcome at the next meeting, provided inflation data did not surprise to the upside. The unemployment rate had ticked higher in recent data, which may give the Board enough comfort to sit and wait.
He also raised an important structural point about the mechanics of rate policy. The full economic effect of a rate rise typically takes 12 to 18 months to work its way through. Three rate increases across three consecutive meetings is simply not enough elapsed time for their full impact to be visible in economic data. That inherent lag is one of the reasons the Reserve Bank tends to move carefully, and it means that even markets currently absorbing the early effects of tightening have not yet seen the full picture.
Buyer Behaviour, Data Literacy and the Emotional Purchase
One of the more candid moments of the conversation came when Warwick raised the explosion of buyer advocates and buyer agents in recent years, particularly younger practitioners who may be drawing on partial or selectively interpreted data to direct clients toward particular decisions.
Gerard acknowledged the challenge directly. Too much data becomes noise, and the risk is that signals get lost, misread or deliberately framed in ways that serve commercial interests rather than the buyer’s. The emotional dimension of property purchasing amplifies this risk. Buying a home is among the highest value and highest emotion decisions most people will ever make, and in that environment, the appeal of a trusted guide, whether a buyer advocate or an experienced agent, is understandable.
He was honest enough to share his own experience: that his house purchase, despite a career built on economic reasoning, was made primarily on emotion rather than careful analysis, and that it turned out well. The lesson he draws is not that emotion is the enemy, but that it needs to be balanced against a clear-eyed view of the cycle and realistic expectations about time horizons.
Looking Forward: What Will People Wish They Had Paid Attention To?
Warwick closed the conversation by asking Gerard what trends or signals people will look back on in five years and wish they had taken more seriously. His answer was reflective and practical.
The biggest mistake he anticipates people making in the current environment is allowing short-term cycle timing concerns to override long-term thinking. Australia’s market nationally is showing signs of moving into a softening phase, and Melbourne has already been in that territory for some months. For buyers who find a property they genuinely want, in a location they have researched, with the intention of holding it through a full cycle, attempting to perfectly time the bottom of the market is both difficult and potentially costly if the right opportunity is missed in the process.
The data, as Gerard and his team at Cotality read it, supports a long-term constructive view of Australian property. That does not mean every market, every segment or every decision will produce a good outcome. But it does mean that for buyers who can see through the cycle rather than fixating on month-to-month movements, the fundamentals remain sound.
Final Thoughts
The conversation with Gerard Burg is a reminder that property data, properly interpreted, tells a far more nuanced story than the headlines typically allow. Melbourne is not uninvestable. Adelaide’s rise is not necessarily permanent. Apartment losses are real but localised. The housing supply challenge is deep and structural. And the policy environment for investors is shifting in ways that will take time to fully understand.
What comes through most clearly is the value of sitting with someone who genuinely reads the data without an agenda. Gerard and the team at Cotality are doing exactly that, and this conversation offers a rare window into what they are seeing.
To hear the full conversation, listen to this episode of Property, Straight Up.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2609119/episodes/19351471
To watch on Youtube
https://youtu.be/LRfY7OU3ysk
