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Here’s what you need to know today

• Counting in the Australian election continues. With more than 80% of the vote counted, the ABC has Labor at 89 seats, the Coalition at 40, minor parties and independents at 10, and 11 still to be called. Notable news from yesterday: Victorian Liberal Tim Wilson reclaimed the seat he lost to teal independent Zoe Daniels in 2022 and Greens leader Adam Bandt appears likely to lose to Labor's Sarah Witty. (ABC News)
  
  

• India and Pakistan traded military strikes yesterday. India launched air strikes on seven targets inside Pakistan, and Pakistan shot down 5 Indian jets and a combat drone. Tensions between the two nuclear-armed states have been rising since last month’s militant attack in the contested Kashmir region. (AFR)
  
  

• Chinese and US officials will meet in Switzerland this week to start negotiations on de-escalating trade tensions. Meanwhile, China’s central bank has cut interest rates and lowered the cash buffer required by banks to try and stimulate the world’s second largest economy. (AFR)
  
  

• US President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney met at the White House. The meeting took place just 8 days after Carney won an election running as the anti-Trump candidate. Despite that context, and Carney reaffirming that Canada was not going to become America’s 51st state, the tone of the meeting was surprisingly warm. (ABC News)
  
  

• America’s trade deficit has almost doubled so far in 2025. With companies scrambling to import goods before tariffs went into effect, the trade deficit is up 93% from the same period in 2024. (Quartz)
  
  

• ASIC have criticised Macquarie’s "multiple and significant compliance failures" after it allegedly misreported 375,000 derivatives and futures transactions. The regulator is requiring Macquarie to prepare a remediation plan and appoint an independent expert to review its implementation. (ABC News)
  
  

• The resurgence of Buy Now, Pay Later player Zip continues. Shares were up 11% yesterday after the company reported strong growth in US transactions. After falling 98% from its 2021 all-time highs, the stock is up more than 500% since October 2023. (Capital Brief)

What the…?

30% of Microsoft’s code has been written by AI. That was the estimate from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a talk with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

This aligns with an estimate from Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai where he estimated that AI was generating 30% of the company’s code. Software development is one of the most natural use cases for AI, and with Microsoft’s CTO Kevin Scott estimating that AI would write 95% of all code by 2030, we may only be at the beginning. (Tech Crunch)

Investing is a lifelong journey

Here’s what you can learn today.

Have office buildings recovered from COVID?

This is an excerpt from our interview with Jason Huljich, joint-CEO of Centuria Capital, on Equity Mates Investing (Apple | Spotify | YouTube)

Can you give us a sense of where the market’s at when it comes to offices, especially post-Covid?

Yeah, so work from home. Covid obviously affected office in a big way in Australia, nowhere near some of the other countries like the US, right. Office has definitely been the toughest sector. Most companies in, say, real estate, are usually three and two or four and one [initial lease period and option to renew]. There was a bit of a reset of tenant needs over the last five years. It's definitely stabilised. Nearly every office lease has come up in the last five years since Covid. So if people need less space, they've taken their less space and they've made the call. You have seen a real change. Now they've got these collab spaces, they've got things for town halls, they've got a lot more amenity for their teams. Most private companies can just say “get back”, while governments are struggling a bit more. Cities like Brisbane, Perth, that didn't really have lockdowns, they're back to normal.

Melbourne definitely has a different mindset of getting people back in the office down here, Sydney probably in between. If you were in the financial core, so this eastern side of the city where it's investment banks, financial services, funds, managers, it's pumping. Every cafe is full. If you were down the western corridor, which is more insurance companies, banks and stuff, it's a bit less busy, right?

So, we've seen it stabilise. Our office portfolio, we're sitting about 91, 92% occupancy, so still pretty high. What you are seeing suffer is in the older buildings. So if you're a B grade or C grade building that's not energy efficient, that doesn't have big floor plates for your tenants, doesn't have good amenity for your tenants, you're putting a lot more things in to get them to work. So it's adding amenity to these buildings. What you've seen with office demand on the investor side is drop off. We value all our assets basically every six months. 31 December across all 430 assets, values dropped 0.2 of a percent. Industrial went up 1%, office was down 1%, everything else is pretty stable. You've seen office values trend down through this period, but now they've begun to stabilise, which is good. So the market sort of turned on the investor front as well for office.

Prefer to watch this interview? All Equity Mates episodes are now available in full on YouTube. Check out our conversation with Jason here:

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