Already there are 90,000 properties sitting empty in Sydney and another 20,000 empty homes in Melbourne. Sooner or later all the investors will have all the empty apartments they want and then everyone else can have a go!

And whenever someone replies with, let’s say, data showing vast numbers of properties are empty in both Sydney and Melbourne because investors snap them up as a nice way to park money in a material asset but can’t be bothered with the hassle of renting the thing out, then the response is simple: we just need even more supply!

One of the things that gets repeated over and over whenever the subject of access to property comes up is that the problem is supply. Increase supply, the mantra goes, and the problem is solved.

This is what our leaders insist, from NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian who has repeatedly said the most effective way we can tackle housing affordability is to increase supply, to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull who has touted increased housing supply as the solution to the crisis.

Cynics could point out that on paper, that simply doesn’t work because housing is both a good and an asset, and one which is also a basic need – so the usual economics of supply and demand don’t work as they do with, say, avocados.

It’s also undercut when lenders offer cheap credit at historically low interest rates. And finally, the fact that NSW housing approvals have risen 85 per cent since 2011, while the price of property has continued to skyrocket might be a teensy tiny clue that maybe, just maybe, the “making more houses” plan isn’t the magic bullet we’ve been assured it will be.

Or we can look at another example where increasing supply completely failed to make housing more affordable, despite those being affected having literal magic powers.

That place is Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn (FFXIV). Yes, in a genuinely hilarious example of real-world economics intruding upon a mystical fantasy realm of dragons and intrigue, it turns out that the housing crisis is not exclusive to flesh and blood humans.

FFXIV is a multiplayer online role-playing game in which players create a character to complete tasks, have adventures, form guilds with other players, go on quests to find treasure and increase their skills, and swear furiously at how impossibly slow Australia’s internet is compared with pretty much everywhere else.

Every so often the developers, the games company Square Enix, add new features to keep people involved and last year one of these was the ability to buy virtual property in the game’s fictional setting of Eorzea.

The problem with this was that only around 2000 housing plots were made available per server, and the wealthy guilds and individual players with a lot of time on their hands to accumulate the necessary in-game means, snapped them all up immediately, exactly as you would expect.

Two players, with the in-game names Altima and Igeyorhm, bought 28 homes between them, presumably so they would never have to clean a virtual bathroom ever again.

Other players were outraged. How could today’s ambitious young Hyur break into the property market when these sorts of players had it all sewn up? Could they maybe buy in the blasted hellscape of Eureka and rent-vest in the nicer, more gentrified bits of Eorzea? How does negative gearing even work in this universe?

Anyway, Square Enix heard the furious cries of their customers and did exactly what Turnbull et al would suggest: they increased supply. Over seven hundred new plots were made available per server; which were immediately bought up, exactly like the original ones.

What mitigated the problem? Increasingly delicate regulation.

In the end Square Enix put limits on how many homes a player could own, and put in a waiting period for resellers to discourage profiteers from flipping properties at a premium within the game, and are still assessing whether more regulation is required. In other words, the company responsible for an online adventure game with trolls is giving more assiduous attention to housing accessibility than the government of our most populous state.

And frankly, that should give us pause. If the magical fighting-folk of FFXIV can’t make their housing system work, what hope do Australians have? Heck, most of today’s young people can’t even cast a Thundaga spell, much less find a place within a reasonable commute to their jobs.

On the plus side, it suggests that the person who sets up the multiplayer online game “Sydney Housing Market: the Legend of the Affordable Fixer-Upper” will be sitting on a gold mine.