Aziz Sunderji makes housing Great Again

I sat down last week for a long conversation with Aziz Sunderji, data wizard and author of the Home Economics Substack. Subscribe to Aziz now. You won’t regret it. 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 contents0:00 Intro2:51 Backgrounds in finance and property12:43 Writing books about housing20:54 The Great Debate compendium31:56 Where AI helps and where it fails36:15 The ProMap housing data tool43:36 Urban cores versus suburbs58:00 Doubting the zoning explanation1:02:47 Housing as an asset with a yield1:11:38 Monopoly, land, and patient owners1:15:49 An elevator pitch for the housing crisis1:19:57 What the housing crisis really is1:33:44 Austin, Tokyo, and closing thoughtsReferences:Aziz’s Substack, Home EconomicsAziz’s mapping tool, thepromap.comAziz’s microsite, The Great DebateAs always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe