I really, really want to dislike Neil and Lucy. The thing is though, they’re just too nice.

Neil, for instance, is funny and clever, with an easy-going, low-key wit that makes evenings fly by. He produces home-brew that is actually drinkable, but also isn’t too tight not to have an outdoor fridge full of top notch SSB. He plays tennis, but not so well that you think you’re up against Federer when you steal an afternoon to sneak away to the courts. Oh, and, like me, he has a completely useless encyclopaedic knowledge of early 80s football and, as a Nottingham Forest fan, an appreciation for the highs and lows of following his team.

Lucy, meanwhile, is clever and funny too. She has a wicked sense of humour and an interesting career she likes to talk about but never bores anyone with. She puts on a mean spread when we descend on them on Saturday afternoon and mixes a perfect Cosmopolitan. She and my wife treat each other like lifelong buddies rather than the acquaintances of just over 18 months that they really are and, although I have to keep this bit to myself, for a woman who’s just crept the wrong side of 40, she looks great in a bikini.

Even their kids are pleasant to be around. Their three rub along with our three without screams, without tantrums, without bleating and without tears, giving us grown-ups the chance to knock back the wine on those lazy summer afternoons rather than run around after our offspring.

See? They’re great, lovely, lovely people. We’re lucky to have chanced upon such a wonderful family of fellow ex-pats to help us through these, admittedly sometimes rocky, first couple of years in our new country.

So, why do I really, really want to dislike them? Well, put simply, I’m bitter. Bitter, jealous, envious. Pumped full of the green-eyed monster.

And why am I so aggrieved, I hear you ask. Well, dear reader, the brutal answer is that bane of most of our lives – property. Basically, it looks like Neil and Lucy – curse their charming kids and gracious bonhomie – have got it right whereas we . . . we have got it all a bit wrong.

Let me explain.

We met Neil and Lucy, like most people we know nowadays, through the kids’ school. We’d landed in January 2009, their Singapore Airlines 747 from Heathrow hit this big, red land six weeks or so later.

The similarities, then, between our two pasty ex-pat families were manifold. All four of us were trying to forge a career in a new continent – Neil and my wife had both landed jobs before getting on the plane, while Lucy and me had both just decided to wing it – and both families had young kids to settle into schools.

The other big similarity though, was that both us and them had decided not to rush into the property thing, both worried that quick decisions would come back and bite us. We’d both sold up in the UK – us a three-bedroom terrace in a little town outside Bristol that you’ve probably never heard of, them a four-bed new-build on an estate in Leicester’s suburbs. To cut a long story short, both us and them had around £450,000 of theoretical collateral to play with and both couples started their new lives Down Under renting pleasant, but presumably temporary houses, in the suburbs.

So far, so similar, so good. But here is where we went our different directions.

My wife – Hannah, by the way, seeing as I still haven’t introduced her properly – and I had a very simplistic approach to finding our ideal home, an approach very much based around how countless Britons have done things for generations now. Our plan was to take the cash we had from selling our place in the old country and use it to buy us a pied a terre in the new world. Simple.

Only, it didn’t quite work out like that.

Thing is, when we first started talking about using Hannah’s nursing skills to forge a new life on the other side of the world – which was roughly a couple of years before we actually boarded the plane – Australia really, really was the land of milk and honey.

When we brought the kids over for a two weeks of holiday and research in 2007, our eyes popped at the state of things. Houses – big houses near the beach, with pools and home theatres – were going for a song and, even more importantly, the pound in our pockets was currency royalty. I can remember that heady fortnight well, can remember that as I fell head over heels in love with Australia I did so while mentally calculating the exchange rate as a quid equals three dollars. Yeah, not the most accurate way of addressing the calculation, but basically accurate. And, of course it translated our £450,000 property fund into a whopping $1,350,000. We were millionaires, godammit!

Now, though, things aren’t quite the same. Let’s look at a few facts and figures, to show you just what I mean. First up, the exchange rate. According to x-rates.com, which was the first thing that came up on Google, your Australian dollar will, as I’m writing this, buy you 60.5 of your English pence. That now whittles down our $1.35m to a not quite so impressive $743,649. Good lord, we’ve lost a fortune!

Still though, harking back to how it was during that fortnight of sun and sand and smiles back in 2007, the best part of three quarters of a million bucks will surely still buy you something worth writing home about, won’t it?

Well, no. Not really.

Of course, it’ll still buy you somewhere to rest your head, but that wasn’t the point when we decided to move. We wanted the whole hog, the two-storey mini-mansion. The high life. Not some three-by-two twenty minutes from the beach, which seems all we can aim at now.

The problem is, you see, that while the global financial crisis thing has been eating away at the value of our British assets, the cost of property in Australia has been soaring.

Property experts here say the staggering prosperity of the land Down Under has sparked a buying frenzy which now makes Australian homes among the world’s least affordable. In Sydney and Melbourne, the rising cost of homes has been enough to ensure many prospective home owners are priced out of the market before they make their first tentative bid. A house which cost $700,000 a year ago, for instance, now sells for $800,000 as housing supply fails to keep up with the demands of an increasing population.

A survey by US-based analysts Demographia, goes so far as to say Australia boasts some of the least affordable housing in the world – calculating that property in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide is less affordable than in London and New York. ‘Affordability’ here, by the way, is worked out as the ratio of the average price of a house against average household incomes.

And the Reserve Bank of Australia isn’t exactly helping things by lifting interest rates six times since October last year, meaning mortgage repayments are rising too. Still at least the RBA is keeping an eye on the whole thing and issuing warnings left right and centre to any politicians who will listen. Recently, it reported that in 15 months to May this year, housing prices in Australia’s capital cities, have risen by an average of around 1.0 per cent a month. That means that they’re now 15 per cent above the price that you could have picked them up for in late 2008. Which is just before we got here. Brilliant.

Anyway, the RBA goes on to blame the soaring prices on the fact that the supply of new housing is not keeping up with demand, mainly due to the fact that it is being hampered by government restrictions and the tightness of finance for developers.

Analysts expect the worst hit capital city will be Sydney, with available housing shrinking as people live longer and the national population tips over 28 million over the next two decades. Currently, though it’s Melbourne that is witnessing the biggest jump in prices – the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported in May that homes there were 28 per cent more expensive in March this year than in March 2009. Still, though Sydney’s not far behind with its 21 per cent hike in the same time.

Oh, and if you’re thinking of perhaps heading to the less fashionable states and territories, I’m afraid that I have to report that things are pretty similar out there. Perth, for instance, which, thanks to its beaches and weather is the least unfashionable of the unfashionable cities, has seen house prices jump 15 per cent in the past year. And the rest? Well, prices rose 12.1 per cent in Brisbane in a year, 14.1 per cent in Hobart, 20.6 per cent in Canberra and 17.5 per cent in Darwin.

All in all, then, our plan to sell our pokey terrace and move into the home of our dreams isn’t really coming to fruition. Which, to be honest, is not doing much for our blood pressure – or my ability to help celebrate the fact that Lucy and Neil are about to move into the kind of house that Hannah and I have been dreaming about since we got here.

Yes, I opened my email today to learn that our lovely friends have a moving-in date two weeks from today and they want our help organising the house-warming. Well that’s just brilliant – honestly I’m really pleased for them. In fact I’m so pleased that I’ll tell you how they did it.

To put it simply, Lucy and Neil realised quicker than us that it was a good idea to change tack.

I can remember the evening. It was just under a year ago and, babysitters in place, the four of us had fled our children and set up base in a boozy restaurant by the Indian Ocean. Top grub and wine consumed, they came out with their new plan. Sick of not finding what they wanted in Perth’s real estate offices – yes, we live in Dullsville, honestly it’s not as boring as everyone makes out – they’d decided to give up on that plan and build their own dream home instead.

I can remember looking at them as though they were mad. I can remember droning on long and hard about the hassle, about how they were committing themselves to months and months more in their rental home. I told them that, surely, the houses that we wanted were just round the corner. I came out with things like ‘spiralling costs’, ‘miles of red tape’, ‘coronary heart attacks’ and the like, amazed at what I was convinced would be their undoing.

But, of course, it wasn’t.

A while or so later, Lucy and Neil bought a plot just down the beach from where we ate that night. New land had opened up and they picked up a piece of land for just under $400,000. The pound was stronger back then, closer to the time when you could calculate the dollar/pound ratio at around 2/1. So that didn’t break them.

And then they happily took the Australian Government’s $21,000 home-building grant. And then they employed some designers who drew up plans for a really quite amazing house, with a really quite amazing garden with a really quite amazing swimming pool. And I began to think that perhaps they weren’t quite so stupid after all.

The thing is, though, that as I said earlier on, Lucy and Neil are lovely people. So, when they came round for wine and nibbles over the next nine months or so, they never rubbed in the fact that work was continuing apace. They didn’t gloat at all, in fact as their new home took shape. All in all, it took them another $450,000 to turn their sandy, beachside plot into the two-storey dream that it now is, the two-storey dream that Hannah and I are now going to help decorate in readiness for a lavish, cocktail-soaked housewarming. Lucy and Neil have said that we can stay the night – in the guest room with en suite – which will be nice.

Perhaps, as we trudge back to our rental bungalow in Kinross the next morning, hungover and bitter, we could stop off somewhere and get some details about the cost of land packages.