Domain’s rental vacancy data for November shows that Sydney and Melbourne are experiencing very high vacancy rates:
SQM Research’s rental vacancy data shows similar trends:
According to SQM Research’s weekly rental listings data, this surge in vacancies across both cities has been driven entirely by apartments.
You can see from the next chart that detached house rental listings in Sydney are fairly tight (8,158), whereas there were a whopping 22,725 units available for rent as at 1 December:
In Melbourne, there were 8,922 detached houses available for rents versus a whopping 23,406 units available:
This gaping oversupply of apartments helps to explain why apartment rents have fallen so heavily across Melbourne and Sydney since the pandemic began in March and immigration flows stopped:
The rents situation is unlikely to turn around until immigration is rebooted.
