Adelaide caravan parks hit with a deluge of desperate people during the rental crisis

Families are being forced to spend months living in caravans as the state’s holiday parks reveal they’re being flooded with cries for help from homeless South Aussies.

Adelaide’s caravan parks are being “inundated” with cries for help from desperate people who have been squeezed out of a tight rental market.

Long-stay onsite vans and cabins are full, overflowing into more expensive holiday parks that only accept short stays.

Some people struggling to rent a home are bringing their own vans, or pitching tents.

It comes as research reveals Adelaide’s rental vacancy rates are the lowest of all Australian capital cities, with stiff competition for a small number of properties while rents are increasing.

Highway 1 Caravan and Tourist Park on Port Wakefield Rd, Bolivar, typically fields 15 calls a day from would-be renters.

Sturt River Caravan Park, near Flinders University, said if it doubled its capacity by adding another 101 vans, it could “fill the place with renters” within a week.

Office manager Janine Seiboth said many of their existing residents were “struggling in the rental market” and park’s waiting list was growing.

“They come in hoping it will be for a few weeks, but it ends up being a few months, then six months, then a year,” she said.

The Smith family, Justin, Zoe-Anne, and their three children, Izabella, 11, Jaxson, 10, and Jai, 9, have been living in a caravan for the past five months, victims of the current rental crisis. Picture: Dean Martin

“We get inundated with phone calls from the public, as well as agencies looking for accommodation for their clients.”

Belair National Park Holiday Park manager Jenna Harris said she had to disappoint callers every day who falsely believed they offered long-term accommodation.

“We have to worry about the Residential Tenancies legislation, so we can’t offer a space of longer than 60 days unless we want to be a residential park,” she said.

“It’s a pretty big problem at the moment from the sounds of it, people can’t get rentals … I know that all caravan parks are in the same position.”

Adelaide’s rental vacancy rates fell to 0.3 per cent in May, the lowest of all capital cities.

That was down from 0.4 per cent in April and 0.7 per cent a year ago, according to data released on Wednesday by property firm SQM Research.

Adelaide’s total number of vacant rental properties in May was 710, down from 761 in April and 1316 a year ago. Compare that to 11,000 in Sydney or Melbourne, where vacancy rates are about 1.5 or 1.7 per cent respectively.

At the same time, Adelaide rents have risen by 18 per cent, to an average $520 a week for houses and $372 a week for units.

SQM Research managing director Louis Christopher said the national rental crisis continued unabated.

The Smith family, Justin, Zoe-Anne, and their three children, Izabella, 11, Jaxson, 10, and Jai, 9,(L), have been living in a caravan for the past 5 months, victims of the current rental crisis. 15 June 2022. Picture: Dean Martin

“Reductions in household size, short-term stay listings eating into longer-term lease availability and now the likely rise in immigration levels, are all factors contributing to this crisis,” he said.

“There is nothing yet in the data that would suggest we are about to see a reprieve.”

While city homelessness service the Hutt St Centre does not provide accommodation, chief executive Chris Burns said demand for help was higher than ever.

About 850 people go through the centre every month for a “warm meal, hot shower, change of clothes and somewhere to charge their phone”. e

Earlier this month, a record 161 people came through in a day.

Many of those were new clients who have only recently become homeless.

Mr Burns suspected some investors were selling rental properties to cash in while prices were high, while others were evicting long-term tenants in order to jack up the rental returns.

“There’s even greater demand now than in the past and the stock of social housing has reduced,” he said.

“(You need) a fantastic rental history and good income to afford a rental property in Adelaide.”

CARAVAN FOR FIVE MONTHS

A quest to find a new place to call home has turned into a five-month tour of Adelaide’s suburban caravan parks for the Smith family.

Zoe-Anne and her husband Justin have been living in their caravan for five months, “moving from park to park” with three children including one with special needs.

They’re at Semaphore for the second time, after a couple of visits to Bolivar and a stint at Gawler.

The family loves a good holiday, but the novelty of the caravan has worn off and “the kids want their life back to normal”, Mrs Smith says. “Izabella wants to have her own room and not to be cramped up in three square metres.”

Evenings are filled with rental property appointments, with no end in sight.

“I didn’t realise it would be so hard, we’ve found the real estate agents want to know more than (banks) when you go for a mortgage,” she said.

“With caravan parks only allowing you to stay so long, and rental applications not interested in us due to being in a caravan park, we have no idea how long we will be in this situation.”