South Australia’s rental crisis: Couple went from seaside house to Adelaide car yard

Social worker Amy Cracknell once dreamt of owning a house. Instead, she and her partner have ended up renting a granny flat in a suburban car yard.

Amy Cracknell is resigned to the reality she is unlikely to ever own a house.

The 35-year-old social worker instead is part of a rapidly growing number of South Australians who face a lifetime of renting.

Ms Cracknell and her partner, Travis Gregory-Phillipps, 42, have experienced first-hand the worst housing crisis in the state’s history.

The pair lived in tents almost six months before they found a granny flat last month to rent for $270 a week in a suburban car yard.

“It’s just so depressing; what is happening is awful,” said Ms Cracknell.

“As much as I would love us to have be able to buy our own place, it is more of a pipe dream that is ever going to happen.

“With the cost of living going up like it is, petrol prices rising, interest rates rising, rent to pay, saving enough is just going to get harder and harder.”

The Airbnb caravan at Victor Harbor used by Travis Gregory-Phillipps and Amy Cracknell when they lost their rental property. Picture: AirbBnb

Ms Cracknell and Mr Gregory-Phillipps were forced to find alternative accommodation when their lease expired on their four-bedroom home at Port Elliott in January.

The couple had been paying $395 a week to live in the property for two years when they were given three months’ notice by their landlord to leave.

Unable to find another rental, they paid $798 to stay in a caravan in the backyard of an Airbnb property at Victor Harbor for a week before picking up a borrowed Toyota bus from a relative at Quorn and heading to the Port Elliott caravan park.

Its owners told them could only stay for seven days, forcing the pair to find camping spots on the Fleurieu Peninsula until space became available at another caravan park at Port Willunga.

Amy Cracknell and her partner Travis Gregory-Phillipps and with their dog, Ruby, in their granny flat at Darlington. Picture: Tom Huntley

Ms Cracknell, a social worker, said they spent a month there until they were told they had to leave, forcing them to pack up and move again – this time to a caravan park at McLaren Vale.

Mr Gregory-Phillipps commuted daily to his workplace at a Lonsdale engineering firm for two months while the couple, who have a female bull mastiff Ruby, continued to look online for rental properties and attend open inspections.

“We would have gone to well over 60 inspections but there were always people behind us with two or three kids who were going to get them before us and it’s harder when you have a dog,” he said.

“Sometimes there were a couple of hundred people with the line going two or three hundred metres. It was just shocking.”

Mr Gregory-Phillipps said density restrictions because of Covid meant only small groups could look through the properties at any one time.

“You have 200, 300 people turning up and they only open up them for 10, 15 minutes so you don’t even get to look at some of them,” he said.

“You might make plans to get to four or so in a day but in the end you can only get to see inside two.

“Doing lots of open inspections is really hard if you’re working because you still have to make sure someone is getting to work and keeping the money coming in.”

Ms Cracknell, who suffers from a chronic illness, said she and Mr Gregory-Phillipps increasingly became frustrated – and anxious – as they searched unsuccessfully for somewhere to live.

Travis Gregory-Phillipps and Amy Cracknell with dog Ruby are living in a car yard at the former Darlington police station. Picture: Tom Huntley

“It started to take its toll on us, we got depressed, we found it really hard to stay motivated, it was mentally exhausting,” she said.

“We had to give the bus back after a couple of months, which meant we had to live in tents.

“Winter was coming and we started getting really worried we wouldn’t have a roof over our heads.”

The couple’s fortunes changed last month when a former employer of Mr Gregory-Phillipps recommended them for a small, one-bedroom granny flat inside the former Darlington police station, now the site of a car yard on the corner of South Rd and Seacombe Rd.

Travis Gregory-Phillipps inside his tent while he and partner Amy Cracknell spent almost six months looking for a rental property. Picture: Amy Cracknell

Inside the converted Toyota bus which Travis Gregory-Phillipps used while they looked for a rental property. Picture: Amy Cracknell,

“My ex-boss put in a good word for us and we were lucky enough to get it, just as we were about to give up,” he said.

“We’ve had to make a lot of sacrifices and taken out loans to keep going, we have a four-bedroom house full of furniture which is in storage at $500 a month but at least we have somewhere for winter.

“It sure beats living in tents. I never want to hear the word ‘camping’ ever again. It is a banned word around here.”