Try telling West Australians there's a terrible housing bubble that's forcing our regulators to crack down on lenders. As they watch Perth prices fall around them, you'll get short shrift.

The locals in Adelaide, Brisbane, Darwin and Canberra will be similarly less than alarmed about what prices are doing, and perhaps more concerned that they could become collateral damage from the excesses of easy money and federal politics in Sydney and Melbourne.

Friday's NAB residential housing survey and forecasts by independent property analyst Michael Matusik vary in extent, but agree in direction – Sydney and Melbourne remain hot, the rest of the nation not so much.

And if the regulators are successful with jawbone and bank-bashing in cooling the market, they also could be denying the provinces the benefits of the real estate arbitrage that sends would-be owners from the big smoke to the provinces.