Rent prices have risen to more than $700 per week and renters on average are paying extra $204 per week compared to five years ago – an increase of nearly 44 per cent as vacancy rates have bottomed out.
Roughly one in three Australian households rent their home and now roughly one in every 68 properties – are available to lease, which is less than half the pre-COVID average, according to Cotality’s Quarterly Rental Review.
If you’re wondering why business is flat and why customer spends are down, look no further.
“With these large groups trying to inspect the same place, it’s very intimidating,” said Leo Patterson Ross of the Tenants’ Union of NSW.
“So people are being kind of pushed out further and further away from employment, from their communities.”
In South Australia, from 2020-2024, rents have climbed by a colossal 43.4 per cent, with wage rises 19 per cent below that.
In Adelaide, when you’ve got huge waves of migrants into an affordable housing market, that makes the housing market unaffordable because it can’t cope with the sudden influx of people.
Reforms to ban no-cause evictions and limit the frequency of rental hikes have been broadly implemented across Australian jurisdictions.
Only ACT has developed an “excessive rent increase” guideline linked to the consumer price index (CPI).
Sydney remains the most unaffordable city to live in, with a median price of $807 a week, followed by Perth ($729) and Brisbane ($696).
Hobart was the least expensive at $584 per week, the Cotality report found.
Regional rents were comparatively more affordable at $591 per week.
But were up by 5.9 per cent in the year to September compared with 3.7 per cent in the capitals and 4.3 per cent nationally.
Limited supply continues to be a major catalyst in rising rents, with the number of rental listings tracking approximately 25 per cent below the previous five-year average nationally for this time of year.
Even Property Investor magazine said Australia’s rental crisis is moving into dangerous new territory, with entire states lacking any suburbs with decent rental prospects, rent costs on a record run of increases and supply of new rental properties drying up.
In 2023, for every private vacant property in the country there are 534 people.
A survey of the Australian rental market has revealed that there are now only 49,000 vacant private rental properties in Australia to cater for a population of 26 million people.
Property commentators are running out of superlatives to describe the scale of the problem and governments are running out of ideas and schemes to resolve it.
“The rental crisis is spiralling out of control,” said Tim McKibbin, Chief Executive Officer, REINSW.
Planned rebooting of immigration to 235,000 people a year will continue to drive rental demand well ahead of available or future supply.