A FEW weeks ago, Morgan Stanley released analysis showing Australia may have a housing glut rather than a shortage.

The estimated 228,000-home shortfall, cited by everyone from the construction industry to economists at the major banks as evidence for why prices remain so high, may, in fact, be an excess of 341,000 homes.

'One thing for certain is that it is unwise to expect the boom conditions to persist indefinitely.'

Whether the new figures are accurate will only become clear in time, as house prices either level off because real estate is scarce, or prices fall and attract more scrutiny about the fundamentals of the market.

But the all-important nature of house price movements underscores a bigger issue: we simply don't know what impact elevated property prices have on other aspects of the economy because we don't have a long history of clean, robust and comparable data to rely on.