One of the things many media commentators have in common is that they assume that if they didn’t know something was happening, then nobody knew it was happening.

It’s far better than admitting they were poorly informed about a subject on which they are claiming to be experts.

We see this with real estate prices all the time, especially with economists who struggle to get their forecasts right.

Usually, in fact, they get them spectacularly wrong.

So we currently have many commentators claiming that the price rises we’ve seen in many major markets across Australia since the start of 2023 are “surprising” or ‘unexpected” or indeed a “shock”.

I have to tell you that here at Hotspotting we weren’t shocked, nor did we find the price rises unexpected, because it’s what we forecast late in 2022 and at the start of 2023.