Rents have risen 50 per cent in some parts of Australia since 2020, forcing some families to live in garages and cars as they struggle to find affordable accommodation.
Single mother Tilly Eastwood says the worst part of being priced out of the rental market isn't living in a garage with her three children. It isn't the absence of windows for light or fresh air. It's not even the 150-plus failed rental applications."I started applying probably about September, so it's been about a year now. I even applied to ones that I didn't want to live in and still got rejected," she says.
Rubber camping mats and rugs provide some protection from the hard concrete floor. A borrowed fan borrowed whirrs constantly, providing the only ventilation. "I've never ever experienced this much issue trying to find a place. Ever. And I've been renting for over 11 years." The figures are compiled from Domain's own websites as well as property market data licensed from third parties.
"We saw house rents across the combined capitals notch a fifth consecutive quarter of increasing rents. For units, it was the fourth consecutive quarter." "We were applying for up to, I would say, probably 20 rentals per week and just constantly getting rejected. We ended up having to rehome our animals as well, which was very sad," the 23-year-old says."I was maybe five months-or-so pregnant when we started looking. We knew it was going to be hard. Obviously, we didn't expect it to be as hard as it was."
They'd been paying $300 a week and hoped to find something in a similar price range. They then teamed up with a friend and increased their budget to $400 a week. It was not enough. When the trio were eventually approved for a lease, the house was half an hour north of Mandurah, in Perth's southwest, and cost $420 a week – 40 per cent more than their previous rental.
In Queensland, regional asking rents are now more expensive than in Brisbane, for both houses and units – a trend not seen in units since 2008 or in houses since 2013. Tamira's mother, 58, has severe emphysema and lives on home oxygen. When Tamira first spoke to the ABC, she was staying with her aunt and her mother was living with a friend."I don't have a [driving] licence or anything like that, so it's really hard for me to care for my mum when she's not even under the same roof … And where she's living, she doesn't have the care that she's supposed to.
"Honestly, it's just depressing … it does tend to make you feel a little bit worthless," the 19-year-old says. Ms Keller leads a program in Toowoomba, in south-east Queensland, which is designed to help people maintain their tenancies. Commuting towns within a couple of hours of the city, coastal regions and so-called lifestyle areas have seen some of the steepest increases in asking rents.
"It was this race for space, and people were willing to pay that premium. People used their homes differently. They wanted that additional space, that spare bedroom, that 'Zoom Room' or office. Australians are renting for longer because they can't afford to buy. This worsened during the pandemic, which sent property prices soaring.
Nicole Gurran, urban planner and director of Sydney University's Henry Halloran Trust, says the crisis in the regions has been a long time coming. And if you get priced out of a regional town, you can't just move a few suburbs away, the way you can in a capital city. "In the very short term, the best thing that we could do is put more income in the hands of low income renters, so they could compete in the rental market," Grattan's Coates says.
"So a lot of the housing that could potentially be affordable to people on low to moderate incomes is actually occupied by households on higher incomes," Professor Hulse says.