Bryan Kavanagh

Overview

Bryan Kavanagh is a Melbourne-based real estate valuer and a long-time figure in Australia's Georgist research scene, associated with the Land Values Research Group (LVRG), a Melbourne body formed after the Canadian land economist H. Bronson Cowan's 1943 research visit that studies the influence of land prices on broader economic activity.[2] Starting in the early 1990s, Kavanagh began compiling the total annual value of Australian property sales back to 1972, and in 2001 first published a measure — the ratio of property sales to GDP — that he used as a "barometer" of the economy: a sharp year-on-year fall in the ratio has historically preceded recessions, including those of 1975, 1982-83, and 1990-91.[2] After statistician Gavin Putland proposed refinements, the measure became known as the Kavanagh-Putland Index; by 2011 the two were using it to warn publicly of an "imminent recession."[2]

Prosper Australia's own history of the group records that Kavanagh succeeded its founding director Allan Hutchinson on Hutchinson's death in 1988, that he had forecast in The Valuer (July 1987) that the next recession would come in 1991–92, and that his barometer rule — recession within two years of a nationwide fall back below 19% in property turnover as a share of GDP — was built from state turnover statistics running from 1972.[4] Fred Harrison's Ricardo's Law (2006) credits Kavanagh, as LVRG director, with using this Economic Barometer to quantify the scale of Australia's property-cycle losses — an estimated A$768 billion of foregone GDP — alongside economist Terence Dwyer's parallel estimates of Australia's land and resource rents.[1] Kavanagh has also written essays for the Georgist journal Progress, where he is described simply as "a real estate valuer in Melbourne."[3]

Kavanagh's own site, The Depression (thedepression.org.au), republishes Georgist historical writing; in September 2026 it carried the late Queensland planner Phil Day's essay on the Georgist inheritance in Australia, an assessment set out on the Australia page.[5]

See Also

• The 18-Year Land Cycle — the underlying periodicity Kavanagh's barometer tracks
• Ricardo's Law (book) — the discovery source documenting Kavanagh's Economic Barometer
• The Taxable Capacity of Australian Land and Resources (Dwyer) — the companion Australian revenue-capacity estimate cited alongside Kavanagh's work
• Prosper Australia — the Melbourne Georgist organisation in whose orbit Kavanagh's research sits
• Fred Harrison — the author whose book carries Kavanagh's figures

Sources

1. Fred Harrison, Ricardo's Law: House Prices and the Great Tax Clawback Scam (Shepheard-Walwyn, 2006), Ch. 15.3, Box 15:5 — used for Kavanagh's role as Land Values Research Group director, the Economic Barometer, and the A$768bn property-cycle GDP-loss estimate. Book page
2. Prosper Australia, "Imminent recession forecast by Kavanagh-Putland Index" (press release, 26 October 2011) — used for the twenty-years-of-data/ten-years-published timeline, the property-sales-to-GDP definition of the index, the 1943 founding date of the Land Values Research Group, and the historical recession precedents (1975, 1982-83, 1990-91). prosper.org.au
3. Progress.org, "Bryan Kavanagh" (contributor page) — used to confirm his profession as a Melbourne real estate valuer and his continuing essay contributions to the Georgist journal Progress. progress.org
4. Prosper Australia, "Land Values Research Group" (organisational history page, undated). prosper.org.au — used for the 1988 succession, the 1987 forecast and the 19% turnover rule (A-claim for the organisation's account of its own people; the rule's predictive claims are the group's own).
5. Phil Day, "Enduring But Unacknowledged: The Georgist Inheritance in Australia," republished on The Depression, 14 September 2026. thedepression.org.au — used for the fact of the site and the republication (A-claim for the fact; the essay itself is Tier 2 origin material).