The latest data from CoreLogic shows that rents nationally soared by 10.0% in the year to August – the fastest annual rate of increase on record:
Rents soar across Australia.
In a similar vein, SQM research posted the tightest rental vacancies on record in August, with just 0.9% of rental properties nationally vacant:
Tightest rental vacancies on record.
The ABC has added further insight into Australia’s rental crisis, showing that a record high 85% of suburbs across Australia are reporting all-time high asking rents for houses, up from 51% immediately prior to the pandemic:
Most house rents are at record highs.
Domain, like SQM, is also reporting record low rental vacancies across the bigger capital cities:
Domain also reporting record low rental vacancies.
Domain’s chief economist, Nicola Powell, describes current Australia rental market conditions as “extraordinary” given “Australia-wide, as well as every single capital city, is deemed a landlord’s market”.
The Grattan Institute’s Brendan Coates has also warned of more rental pain to come:
“Advertised rents are an early predictor of what happens across the whole rental market over time”.
“The big worry is that advertised rents rising so quickly suggests that, for a lot of people, rents are going to get more expensive in the next couple of years, not cheaper.”
Brendan Coates is right: the worst is yet to come for the rental market.
The Albanese Government has committed to driving-up immigration to its highest ever level, including via:
- Lifting the permanent non-humanitarian migrant intake to a record high 195,000 a year;
- Turbo-charging temporary migration by expanding work rights for international students by:
- Uncapping the number of hours international students can work while studying for another year; and
- Extending the length of post-study work visas by two years.
The former Morrison Government’s uncapping of international student working hours has already seen a huge lift in student visa applications from India and Nepal. And Labor’s maintenance of this policy, combined with its two-year extension to post study work visas, will only turbo-charge international student arrivals even more.
Where will the hundreds of thousands of new migrants live when there is already a chronic rental shortage across Australia?
The only possible outcome is even lower rental vacancies, rapidly rising rents, and thousands of Australians being thrown into homelessness.
The Albanese Government’s ‘Big Australia’ immigration drive will only succeed in turning the rental crisis into a catastrophe and is an inequality disaster in the making.
