I sat down last week for a long conversation with Aziz Sunderji, data wizard and author of the Home Economics Substack.
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With a background in banking and finance, Aziz comes to the question of housing with a focus on asset pricing and investment incentives. This means he diverges from much of the public policy conversation that merely assumes home prices should always be lower, but planning regulations and zoning are in the way.
But he also comes with a lot of technical and design know-how.
He has built a website summarising the Great Debate on housing supply and price, and a mapping tool called ProMap. Aziz was able to show me live on screen how ProMap can reveal patterns in the data that are usually hard to see, such as the migration to the suburbs and the price gains in suburbs relative to city centres since COVID.
You could say that his ProMap tool has made housing analysis Great Again.
It would be a dream to have a tool like that for Australian property data.
I hope you enjoy our conversation.
Table of contents
0:00 Intro
2:51 Backgrounds in finance and property
12:43 Writing books about housing
20:54 The Great Debate compendium
31:56 Where AI helps and where it fails
36:15 The ProMap housing data tool
43:36 Urban cores versus suburbs
58:00 Doubting the zoning explanation
1:02:47 Housing as an asset with a yield
1:11:38 Monopoly, land, and patient owners
1:15:49 An elevator pitch for the housing crisis
1:19:57 What the housing crisis really is
1:33:44 Austin, Tokyo, and closing thoughts
References:
Aziz’s Substack, Home Economics
Aziz’s mapping tool, thepromap.com
Aziz’s microsite, The Great Debate
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