Anybody with half a brain would recognise that lowering international student numbers (and migration generally) will alleviate the rental crisis.
The correlation between the surge in international students and temporary migration is obvious.
Temporary visa numbers in Australia have surged by around 400,000 higher than the pre-pandemic peak, as illustrated in the next chart from Justin Fabo at Antipodean Macro:
Not surprisingly, asking rents have experienced a commensurate rise:
It turns out that if you import an additional 400,000 renters, they will need somewhere to live.
Hilariously, there are still shills claiming that international students have no impact on the rental market.
Check out the below Tweets from paid shill and pollster Kos Samaris, labelling those of us concerned about rental impacts as “dog whistlers”:
Samaris’ claims defy both common sense and evidence.
A report published this year by The Australian noted:
“Australia’s biggest universities are failing to provide 80% of their foreign students with guaranteed housing”…
“Universities have built enough dorm rooms to accommodate only 40,000 students nationally – a fraction of the 205,000 international students they have enrolled to study in Australia this year, while private training colleges have failed to provide any accommodation, even though they have accepted 149,000 foreign students this year”.
The Property Council of Australia’s Student Accommodation Council executive director, Torie Brown, told The Australian that “The vast majority of students in Australia still live in the residential market’’.
Brown also claimed that rental market was so tight that student housing providers that traditionally catered to international students were seeing more Australian students move in.
Meanwhile, independent economist Tarric Brooker took Samaris’ claims apart on Twitter (X) citing findings from the ABS’ Temporary visa holders in Australia survey:
Here are the unvarnished facts without additional commentary straight from the ABS figures:
- International students are much more likely to live alone than the average adult under 40 (7.2% vs 4.2%)
- 14k reside in a boarding school or other on campus accommodation
- 116k live in a detached house, 51k in townhouses and 173k in apartments
- 28% reside in group households as defined by 2 or more unrelated people living together, compared with 13% for the population aged 20 to 30.
- 25k live in homes with 2 or more spare bedrooms, 68k with 1 bedroom spare. 68k live in a home with no spare bedroom’s.
- 35k live in a home needing 2 or more extra bedrooms, 63k with 1 extra bedroom being required as defined by the ABS.
Brooker followed up with another Tweet citing data from the Property Council, CBRE and the Australian government debunking Samaris’ claims:
Since folks have asked me about it, here are the numbers on purpose built student accommodation (PBSA).
According to the Property Council there are 76.5k beds in the (PBSA) system, CBRE puts the figure at 60k.
Of this 26% of beds occupied beds are held by domestic students.
According to the Property Council in 2021, the total occupation of PBSA beds was 63k. This snapshot was taken at a low point when ~320k international students were in the country due to the pandemic, compared with 696k today.
On these numbers up to 56.6k international students live in purpose built student accommodation (based on Property Council bed estimate since its higher) or up to 8.1% of those currently in the country.
ABC Business Correspondent Ian Verrender also challenged Kos Samaris’ claim:
“If you decrease the demand upon housing particularly, rental housing, by the kind of numbers that the government is suggesting, then that should take the pressure off rental increases”.
“We’ve got a housing shortage here. We’ve got a lot of people competing for that housing. And that means the price of rents is continuing to rise and it’s been rising really strongly for the past year or more”.
“If you decrease that pressure, you’ll decrease the pressure on rental demand”.
In other words, Kos Samaris has been comprehensively schooled and should put the racism dog whistle away.
Lowering student numbers (and migrant numbers more generally) would take direct pressure off the rental market.
It’s basic supply and demand math.
