The Courier Mail published an article on the worsening rental crisis afflicting Brisbane, with tent cities mushrooming across the city:
“The number of people congregating in these kinds of arrangements at the moment is absolutely a function of the lack of housing in the system”, Q Shelter executive director Fiona Caniglia said.
“The reason why there’s a lot more visible people camping at various sites around a place like Brisbane City is because rental affordability is at an all-time low”.
“And overall, we don’t have enough homes to meet demand”, she said.
Australia faces more homeless encampments if the latest rental vacancy data from PropTrack is anything to go by.
PropTrack reports that Australia’s rental vacancy rate fell to a fresh record low of only just 1.07% nationally, with the capital city vacancy rate falling to just 1.04%:
PropTrack senior economist, Paul Ryan, commented that “rental markets are proving extremely challenging for renters, with very limited availability across most of the country”.
“February saw rental vacancy rates decline further, down 0.12 percentage points to hit a fresh low of just 1.07%. Most capitals and regional areas were facing as limited or more limited availability than they were compared to a year ago”.
“With rental market conditions extremely tight, competition for rentals is likely to remain tough. In the near-term, that is likely to continue to put pressure on rents and further strain rental affordability, which is already at its worst level in at least 17 years”, Ryan said.
PropTrack’s dire assessment follows rental data released by Domain showing the national vacancy rate collapsing to a record low of just 0.7%:
Source: Domain
SQM rental vacancy rates have also collapsed:
So too does the latest rental vacancy rate data from the REIA:
Source: Shane Oliver (AMP)
Each data provider measures rental vacancies differently, but all show the same thing: rental vacancy rates have collapsed to historical lows.
Meanwhile, asking rents have rocketed across Australia, according to SQM Research:
PropTrack also shows that asking rents have soared by 38% since the beginning of the pandemic:
The driver of the rental crisis is obvious: the federal government ramped immigration to record highs, delivering an unprecedented 680,000 increase in Australia’s population in 2023:
Anybody denying the impact of this migration surge only needs to look at the below chart showing the growth in quarterly asking rents:
To nobody’s surprise, asking rents fell when net overseas migration turned negative at the start of the pandemic only to rocket when immigration surged to record levels after borders reopened.
Every Australian should ask the Albanese government why it has imported record numbers of people into Australia without a plan to house them and provide infrastructure?
Because this current rental crisis is the direct result of the federal government’s record immigration.
