If you've been struggling through auction after auction because of an inflated housing market that's made homeownership a distant dream - well, the head of the Treasury Department has a message for you: maybe it's your mindset that's getting in the way.

John Fraser has been in the role since the start of 2015; he's also a member of the Board of the Reserve Bank of Australia; and today he was asked in a Senate hearing whether his department had figures on young people and homeownership.

It doesn't.

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"The data is not great," Mr Fraser admitted. "You try to draw conclusions. You've also got to make a number of assumptions. The behavioural aspects are different."

At my age, when I was buying a home in the '70s, I probably had a different mindset to what a lot of younger people have at the moment."

Mr Fraser acknowledged that those were "simpler times", but continued by questioning whether young people's hopes were set a bit too high.

"You have to make assumptions about what is 'reasonable aspirations' for a house."

Greens Senator, Peter Whish-Wilson, then asked if Treasury has consulted with young people about ways to improve ownership rates.

Mr Fraser said it had "consulted widely", but couldn't answer directly.

#Avogate

All this comes off the back of #avogate - when demographer and commentator Bernard Salt said young people can't afford homes because they keep spending on frivolous things like smashed avocado brunches.

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But according to research group CoreLogic, the cost of housing has gone up waaaaaay more than your average brunch.

Figures out today found that since February last year, the average value of a home in Sydney went up 18 per cent, and it's gone up 2.6 per cent this month alone. That's the biggest annual increase since 2002 - the glory days of the 2000s boom.

In Melbourne, the average year on year increase was 13.11 per cent, up 1.46 per cent in February.

Canberra had the biggest monthly increase - the average place went up 3.24 per cent in February, and 10.35 per cent in the year.

Let that sink in for a minute. If you bought a place in the capital in January, by now it'd be worth 3.24 per cent more than when you handed over the cash, according to the data.

All capital cities recorded an average price increase in the last year, except Perth and Darwin, where the downturn in the mining boom is hitting hardest.

The demand for housing is coming from investors, head of CoreLogic, Cameron Kusher, told ABC Online.

It's pretty clear it's not coming from first home buyers at the moment, we've pretty much got record low levels of first home buyer activity."

"Quite clearly it's coming from the investor segment of the market - both domestic investors and foreign investors - as well as people who already own homes upgrading," Cameron said.

It's not just people in major cities who are struggling. As the ABC reported yesterday, people living in coastal regions fare just as badly in the housing market.

"For the very low income households, who are largely the people who are the homeless population on pensions and benefits or no income at all, there is really almost nothing available for them," Judy Stubbs from the University of New South Wales said.