City Road Podcast

You could be forgiven for thinking that the Chinese are the only foreign investors buying housing in Sydney and Melbourne. There has certainly been a lot of stories about foreign real estate investment in Australia in the news lately. Often, this news is about Chinese investment in housing.  In this episode of City Road Podcast we talk with University of Sydney PhD scholar Sha Liu, who has been digging into the patchy data to find out just how much foreign investment in Australian housing comes from China, and what makes Australian property so attractive to foreign investors.

There are more than 24 million pets in Australian homes. But our cities are not the easiest places to own a pet. You can’t take your dog on the train in Australia, and if you’re a renter owning a pet, well that can make things really difficult when you try to secure a home. In this episode of City Rd Podcast we talk with Drs Emma Power from the University of Western Sydney and Jen Kent from Sydney University, about why Australian cities don’t necessarily share Australians’ love of pets.

We talk to Professor Nicole Gurran from Sydney University’s School of Architecture, Design and Planning about the impact of online home-sharing platforms for global cities like Sydney. Short term rental websites have certainly transformed the way we travel around the world. More than 150 million people have already stayed in an Airbnb home and you can choose from over 3 million homes listed in more than 190 countries. That’s more than the world’s largest hotel chains, such as the Marriott and Hilton. But by reimagining local residential homes and bedrooms as potential tourist accommodation, Airbnb and others might also be transforming local communities. These global digital tech operators are operating beyond the established tourist quarters of many cities, and in some places, they’re trying to bypass existing urban planning and building management controls. So not everyone is convinced of the local benefits that these global digital tech operators promote. In fact, there’s increasing opposition to so-call