Adelaide’s rental crisis: Search our table to see what the data says

As rental open inspections are swamped by desperate house hunters, we’ve trawled official data to create a searchable table showing rent prices for every suburb.

More than 20 groups of hopeful renters attended an inspection at the Citi Fringe apartments on South Terrace on Wednesday. Picture: Tom Huntley

There are now 20 hopeful sets of tenants applying for every unit and house offered for rent in Adelaide – and for those becoming desperate, where you look may be the key to finding a home.

Amid increasing concern about the SA rental crisis, The Advertiser can today reveal Office of Business and Consumer Affairs figures on every new tenant/landlord bond agreement lodged in 2019 and 2020, how much weekly rent is charged and where the home was let.

That means your can search our database to see how much people are paying to rent in every suburb and how much it has increased in the past 12 months.

Figures are unreliable for suburbs in which there have been few new bonds, but readers can search every suburb here.

The government data published by The Advertiser is for every new rental agreement signed.

Most alarming is that for every one of the 18,790 homes rented in 2020, almost 200 people inquired about each home.

And that total number of homes let was down on 2019, where 25,865 were rented.

For units, there was also huge demand and a dip in stock with 12,735 units let in 2020 compared to 17,335 in 2019.

The State Government data also shows large increases in weekly rent paid across many parts of Adelaide.

Turner Real Estate chief executive Emma Slape said the most alarming increases had been recorded in the last three months of 2020 and the first two months of this year.

But even with the COVID-19 affected slump in leases in the first half of 2020, large increases were reported in sought-after areas.

Turner’s open inspection of a CBD South Tce apartment attracted 20 viewing groups yesterday and one inspection of another property attracted 70 groups.

“I think this is a really important community based conversation as it is starting to cause distress for a range of people, who in the normal course of things would have been able to secure a rental,’’ Ms Slape said.

She said much closer relationships between landlords and tenants were important in the current market.

“One of the projects that the State Government may need to consider is the availability of stock in the Adelaide CBD which was previously used as student accommodation and how that can have a broader accommodation purpose,’’ she said.

“This is the only sector of the rental market that has a high level of stock and there may be options to work with building managers and landlords to develop this for wider use.”

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