I was not present at the Malta Developers Association’s press conference during which they released their KPMG-commissioned report on the property market but read what this newspaper reported. There are some issues that certainly need more exploring.

Mark Bamber limits his definition of an economic bubble to one that “more often than not is the result of intense speculation that leads to artificial price hikes”. Try selling that limited approach to those who, over the last year, have been hit by demands for double and sometimes even triple the amount of rent they had been paying only a few months back. There’s no artificiality in that sort of extortion.

Were the econometric tests carried out limited only to the sales/purchases side of the market? The variables which he mentions are all, at least prima facie, a bit of an arm’s length away from the realities of the rental market, which does not appear as the report ventured into at all.

The newspaper report says nothing as to whether the MDA/KPMG study examined at all the ghettoisation element present in big chunks of the local property market, projects built and priced at certain levels that are absolutely out of the reach of the locals’ incomes (or vital chunks of it) while the locals end up being dumped into low-quality, so-called “first-time buyers’ accommodation”.

Did the study tackle the issue of so many long vacant and unutilised property? When I can see the full report, I am sure I will find much more to say about this ostrich-like approach, which is only serving to inflate the housing component in the locals’ cost of living and which, were the index to be given a good brush-up (especially in the present weightings component of it), would certainly show that what the MDA is asserting that “there is no sign of a property market supply glut” is miles away from the reality of property prices, both sale/purchase and rental being factually too high and seriously inflationary.