Over the last ten years at Elite Agent, we have reported pretty much every interest rate meeting.

Some have created great excitement in both good and not-so-good ways.

And there have also been some totally utterly boring ones, like the period between August 2016 - and May 2019, where for 30 months straight, the rate remained steady at 1.5 per cent.

During this particular ‘dry’ news spell, there were two sources of mild amusement for us that somewhat broke the monotony:

1. The number of folks in the industry who would take to Facebook with a “breaking news post” - which all looked pretty similar for 30 months straight

2. Trying to imagine what might have been served at morning tea during these meetings. Was it scones? Tim-tams? Something lower in carbs? What did they do for all that time, only to emerge with a big statement about rates being on hold. For 30 months straight.

Anyway.

The next piece of excitement after the announcement on the 1st Tuesday of the month is the release of the actual minutes from the meeting in the following week, which we would scour for any fodder to create a story.

If you've ventured to click on one of those links and tumbled down a rabbit hole, you're well aware that it's typically a dry, lengthy marathon read. Well, with the notable exceptions of the thrilling episode where Dr. Lowe vowed no interest rate hikes until 2024, and the riveting sequel where rates skyrocketed well before the 2024 deadline – those were quite the rollercoaster, albeit not the fun kind!

Back to ChatGPT: Thankfully, we can take way less time to get to the point/s, and I thought today, in honour of Dr. Lowe’s final day as top biscuit, we would do an analysis of the minutes of his final meeting.

Today’s Prompt

For this one, you’ll need ChatGPT4 with the plugin Ask Your PDF installed, and the prompt goes like this:

I would like to chat to a document. I am going to act as a real estate agent and you are going to act as an educator to tell me only things you think are relevant to me and my work as a real estate agent in Australia. Here's the link https://www.rba.gov.au/speeches/2023/pdf/sp-gov-2023-09-07.pdf

You’ll initially get a user-friendly summary touching on the main points from the meeting, but from there, you can ask the PDF any question you like, such as:

• What lessons have been learned from the forward guidance provided during the pandemic, and how can this inform future strategies?

• How might the coordination of monetary and fiscal policies affect the real estate market dynamics in the future?

• Focusing only on interest rates just impacts people who hold mortgages, which is about 1/3 of Australians. How does this make sense?

• And finally:

You can use this technique on pretty much any long document that you want to absorb quickly.

So with that, I’ll leave you guys to ask your own questions - alongside this image from MidJourney of Dr. Lowe leaving the office for one last time…

Happy Hunting 🚀