Cheap rents Queensland: Bargain rental rates revealed

A QUEENSLAND town has been revealed as the nation’s cheapest place to live, with tenants in one suburb forking out just $120 per week.

IT’S official - Gladstone rents were the lowest in the nation last year.

Property data analytics firm CoreLogic has released its Best of the Best 2017 report, examining a range of trends across the real estate industry.

The Gladstone Observer says the report identified two different suburbs in Gladstone as having the lowest median rentals in Australia for houses and units in 2017.

You could rent the average house in Barney Point for $150 a week last year, while renting the average unit in South Gladstone would set you back just $120 per week.

Remarkably, six of the top 10 suburbs in Australia for cheap unit rentals were located in the Gladstone Region, with the remainder in South Australia.

Gladstone zone chair for the Real Estate Institute of Queensland Alicia Williams said the figures were no surprise given the events of the previous few years, which saw the housing and rental markets plummet.

“What led to this particular incident was unprecedented,” she said.

Gladstone city with the port, coal loading facility, harbour and Curtis Island in the background.

“We had three LNG plants built at once and a declining resources industry - there were a lot of variables in play that no one forecasted.”

Ms Williams said while Barney Point and South Gladstone were older areas of the port city, the figures pointed to a rental market in Gladstone that responded to broader macroeconomic influences, rather than anything specific about those areas of town.

“If you look at Catalina Heights, that’s included in South Gladstone... so it’s important to make sure we’re comparing apples with apples,” she said.

Australia's cheapest rents have been revealed.

Though the figures revealed in CoreLogic’s report cover the 12 months to November last year, real estate agents in Gladstone have been talking about a turnaround in the market since around September, a view Ms Williams said was borne out by the data.

Bonds lodged in Gladstone between September 2016 and September 2017 were found to have risen by 4.1%, while three-bedroom town-house median rentals rose slightly over a similar period.

“All the agencies I’m aware of had our biggest month for the last five years in November,” she said.

“Obviously not in terms of dollar values but in terms of the number of transactions.

“That’s a really good indicator of where the market’s going... there is a lot of confidence in the resources industry.

“Certainly now with the workers’ camps outside of town, as much as they were probably detrimental at their inception. Now if there are any significant project announcements we know we can deal with it without it having a large impact on our housing market.”

Raine and Horne Gladstone principal Mark Patton cited Australia’s rebounding mining sector, the LNG industry and a spike in cruise ships docking at Gladstone harbour as likely contributors to an improved outlook for Gladstone’s market in 2018.

“Gladstone provides commercial and industrial services to the mining sector, along with engineering, and these companies are ramping up their workforces,” Mr Patton said.

Ms Williams said renters who weren’t willing to commit to long-term leases just a year ago were now eager to do so.

“They’re trying to lock in those prices because they feel the market has changed,” she said.