Media claims we should be grateful for foreign buyers

So here we have the media actually acknowledging the existence of wealthy foreign buyers in the Australian Real Estate market, however one author writes that we should be grateful for them.

Now, the author might be correct, had the glut of apartments not been built specifically to cater to the demand of foreign buyers and only if foreign buyers were ONLY buying apartments.

In any economy there are multiple cycles going up and down at any given time.  In engineering, the perfect storm with salaries occurred just before the GFC when many industries were all peaking at the same time, putting a premium on engineers which, when the various industry cycles bottomed out at about the same time, ended with heaps of engineers all looking for work at the same time.

The same is true of property.  Of residential property, there are many sectors and sub-sectors.  Just because you've got a great 1-bedroom apartment in Newport isn't going to mean a thing if what's booming are 3-bedroom houses.

So the housing prices are in a completely different cycle to apartments, which are usually home to singles or couples without children.  Apartments don't come with a lot of land, making them less attractive to speculators due to the need for high returns and the risk that another 300 apartment block opening up next door that will compete for the relatively few tenants.

Claims that we should be grateful that foreign buyers are keeping the prices of apartments from collapsing (something that only the developers would really worry about and would normally stop creating more supply if they're unable to unload the last lot of apartments they built) are pretty stupid when it's the price of housing the average Australia cares about, NOT the price and vacancy rates of apartments.

The people already living in houses want them to only go up, the people trying to buy them would like to see them come down (at least long enough to get into the market).

Ultimately I think what the Media and the Politicians all ignore or avoid is that young people don't want any sort of unfair advantage, they simply want a level playing field, but the media is so bent on trying to remain positive about immigration that it's ignoring the fact that it's selling out locals for the security that higher house prices brings people who own their own home.

When a young couple from China in the 20's is able to buy a house in the Eastern suburbs of Melbourne for over $1 million IN CASH, when they haven't got the sort of income needed to service a loan of that size, then we're not playing on a level playing field.  Anyone who claims otherwise is either lying to themselves or just to you.