My first – and last, so far – appearance on the ABC's Media Watch program was in February 2007.
It had been a particularly hot summer. John Howard discovered climate change. And in capital cities across the country, would-be tenants jostled for position at crowded open inspections.
On a quiet news day, just after New Year's, we splashed the paper with a story of mine with the headline "Through the roof: rents to soar 20%".
It was, necessarily, a condensed summary of a longer story about how generous new tax breaks on superannuation taxes were tipped to encourage investors to dump investment properties and plough the money into super instead. The Treasurer predicted as much.
The head of the Real Estate Institute of NSW told me landlords would look to increase rents by "as much as 20 per cent" – a figure so fantastical sounding it attracted the attention of Media Watch's producers, who ran an omnibus story critical in general of the media's reporting of the national rental squeeze, particularly by media outlets with a financial interest in spruiking property.
Friends chastised me in the pub for giving their landlords ammunition to lift rents.
Turns out, however, the prediction wasn't too far off in magnitude, if perhaps a little premature.
According to rental bond figures analysed by the NSW Tenants' Union, Sydney rents rose 12.9 per cent in 2007, before the annual pace of rental price growth peaked at 15.15 per cent over the year ended the September quarter 2008.
And it wasn't just Sydney. The surge in rents was a national affair which followed an unusually weak period of rental growth in the early 2000s after the concessions on capital gains tax sparked a surge in investment properties.
But by 2007, the new supply had worn off, population growth was surging and interest rates rose to near double digits. According to the rental component of the consumer price index, rents nationally rose by 8.4 per cent in 2008.
And to prove I am not in the pocket of the real estate lobby, here it is: "Through the floor: rents to slump in 2017". I won't be so bold as to offer a numerical prediction. Once burnt, twice shy.
But the slump in rents is upon us. Rents are rising at their slowest annual pace in nearly two decades, according to last week's Reserve Bank statement on monetary policy, which also notes the value of new building approvals has reached a record share of GDP.
Perth is the epicentre of landlord pain, with slow population growth and the end of the mining boom dampening demand for rental properties.
In other capital cities, particularly in inner Melbourne and Brisbane, booming apartment construction has sparked concern about oversupply and rising settlement failures on off-the-plan developments.
According to the Reserve: "Further increases in housing supply over coming years is expected to result in a protracted period of low rent inflation."
Indeed, weak rent increases have been a major driver of the recent surprising weakness in general price inflation. According to the Bureau of Statistics, which surveys a national sample of real estate agents about rent increases, rents increased nationally by just 0.7 per cent over the year to the September quarter.
The NSW Tenants' Union has begun producing a quarterly "Rent tracker" report, based on a survey of rental bonds lodged with Housing NSW which has been running for 26 years.
It finds the average value of rental bonds lodged in Greater Sydney rose 5 per cent last financial year and just 3 per cent in the rest of NSW.
As with all things property, there are a range of data sources for renters looking to compare their rent.
On the lower side of estimates, a "Rental Review" by Core Logic RP Data as at August 31 estimated median weekly rents had fallen half a per cent over the previous year, to be 1.4 per cent lower than their peak in May 2015.
Surveys of advertised rents by Domain Group/Australian Property Monitors, owned by Fairfax, and SQM Research paint a similar picture of weak rental growth.
"Renters are now in a much better position to negotiate," according to Core Logic's head of research, Cameron Kusher: "As long as wages growth continues to stagnate, coupled with historically high levels of new dwelling construction and slowing population growth, landlords won't have much scope to increase rents."
Rents are still at historic highs, but the heat is out of the market.
Now is the time to haggle before signing your next lease. And if your landlord comes knocking for a rent rise, feel free to show them this article.