Unlike the stockmarket, there have been no earnings downgrades on rental housing. And unlike the stockmarket, the downturn in housing prices has been pretty moderate.

Melbourne-based investment adviser Atchison Consultants has compared the performance of asset classes for a decade; managing director Ken Atchison for even longer.

On the Atchison numbers, residential property has delivered a better total return - cash plus capital - than most other asset classes over the past decade.

On most time horizons - one, three, five or 10 years - residential property has outperformed Australian shares.

In the past year, as the more defensive assets have come to the fore, housing has fallen behind fixed interest and listed property.

(To make the comparison, Atchison uses the Real Estate Institute of Australia price series and assumes a net return of 3 per cent.)

John Edwards, the founder of residential property analyst Residex, cuts the numbers a different way.

Over a 10-year term (any 10 years in the past 33), says Edwards, housing has delivered a higher return, and less volatility, than equities or bonds.

"For the ordinary person, housing investments are best, provided they are held for 10 years and are not over-geared," Edwards says.

Of course, all these comparisons come with qualifications. The numbers do not account for the costs of maintenance or capital expenditure required for housing.  And there is the old caution: the past is no guarantee of the future.

Edwards has tracked the dynamics of house price growth, yield and total return back to 1906.

For the first half of the 20th century, when most Australians rented, price growth was low but gross yields were high, above 10 per cent. For those 50 years it was the cash yield that delivered the return.

Then, with the baby boom at the end of World War II, house prices took off. The rent yield, which approached 20 per cent in the first years of the postwar housing shortage, dropped for 60 years.

But what was lost in yield was made up in capital.

In 1948-2008, house prices rose through a series of booms, which at times delivered annual returns of more than 20 per cent.

Edwards says the market is headed back towards the conditions of the early 20th century. Everything will revert to being positively geared," he says. "It will become more like commercial property; it has to."

Parts of the following article came from the Weekend Australian Financial Review. It has been amended by Silverhall for the purpose of this blog post