Third consecutive hike this month, bringing the cash rate to 4.35%, the exact level it peaked at back in late 2023 before the cuts began. A strange kind of full circle to sit with, given how much has happened to the market in between.
The median's roughly forty percent higher than it was the last time rates sat here. Vacancy's a touch looser but still tight by any historical standard. Population growth hasn't meaningfully slowed. The fundamentals that carried this market through the original hiking cycle are, if anything, more entrenched now than they were back then.
I don't think a return to 4.35% breaks anything that survived it the first time. But I also don't think I get to assume that just because it happened once. Watching the next few months of data as closely as I did back in 2023, for exactly the same reasons.