Renting Gold Coast: One tenant’s horror tale
A woman has shared the extraordinary story of how she has been treated as a tenant on the Gold Coast, saying renters are just ‘pushed around’.
Gold Coast
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SHE is bright and engaging. A glass half-full kind of person. But Sue’s home is gloomy.
There is little furniture. Boxes are piled high.
Everywhere I look are the signs of a life upended.
This won’t be Sue’s home much longer. For the fourth time in eight years, Sue, a woman in her mid-50s, faces eviction.
She has looked far and wide for a new rental. She has submitted dozens of applications. But she expects she will soon be sleeping on a friend’s sofa and will have to give up her pets.
Sue was not given a reason by her landlord for being asked to leave. In Queensland, once a lease is nearing its end, all a landlord must do is give two months’ notice. The Residential Tenancy Authority says “retaliatory terminations” are not allowed, but Sue believes she knows her mistake.
“I am reasonably outspoken,” she says. “I have continually asked the agent to fix things. Nothing was done when I moved in. There had been an arrangement put in place, ah, we’ll give you a week’s grace, you clean it.
“The place was dirty, and aside from being dirty the gutters were filled with leaves. The dishwasher’s never worked ... but I just get fobbed off with the same responses.
“... The agent obviously doesn’t want to ask the owner to pay for anything. They don’t want to risk the owner getting annoyed with them and taking their business somewhere else.
“I have a friend whose family own properties they lease through an agent. He says the agents tell them, ‘If you don’t like them (the renters) we’ll get rid of them’. Which is why they only give you a six-month lease.”
Without meaning to, Sue has become a veteran of the rental game.
At one of her recent homes – a converted building at the back of a garden – council pinged the owner for lacking proper permissions.
Although she had no dealings with the council herself, she says the owner took her anger out on her.
“I never knew anything about it,” Sue says. “I never thought to question with anybody, ‘is your property compliant with council’ and so on.
“But after that she (the owner) turned really nasty.”
At another, Sue ended up taking the owners to the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal (QCAT) over major problems with the property. And won.
This did not go down well with the agent. “She was furious,” Sue says.
At another, she became tired of having to spend thousands of dollars of her own money to fix issues.
“It was a grotty property, they never spent money on it,” she says.
“Dreadful driveway. I had people that said, ‘I’m not driving down that driveway, it’ll destroy my car’.”
To her annoyance, that same property is on sale, with the agents spruiking many of the improvements Sue made.
Finding another home is proving a nightmare for Sue – as it is for anyone thrust into the Gold Coast’s very tight rental market.
She believes the unfortunate run of events at other properties is making it even harder. “It’s a small community,” she says. “I don’t know what’s being said around the traps.”
She says she is speaking out to highlight what tenants go through.
“You have to walk on eggshells because if you upset someone, you’re out,” she says.
“They just push you around. It’s a case of ‘you do what we tell you’.
“But to turn everything around and get into something else, it’s so hard – and it costs thousands.
“Tenants are looked upon as people who have no money. But it costs a fortune to be a tenant. It costs a fortune to have to move.”
There is one more important thing to know about Sue. That’s not her real name. She doesn’t want me to use it.
Because despite everything she remains a glass half-full kind of person and still hopes to find another rental.
NOVEMBER 5: HOW COAST COULD BE SAVED FROM GRIPS OF HOUSING CRISIS
HIGHER density will be necessary to fix a crippling housing shortage and prevent the Gold Coast from turning into Monte Carlo, a leading property expert and MP warn.
Ray White chief economist Nerida Conisbee said limited land supply combined with strong population growth meant higher densities were key to ensuring “adequate levels” of housing supply.
It comes after the Bulletin this week revealed that rents had risen by 17.5 per cent in 12 months on the Gold Coast, causing a sudden increase in homelessness among working families.
“It’s becoming more and more apparent that there is a housing shortage,” Ms Conisbee said.
“It’s coming through not just in house and unit prices, but in rising rents.
“Adequate levels of housing supply are critical to keeping rents under control.
“... (People think) there’s a lot of high density, but the reality is that a lot of the Gold Coast is very low density and the high density bit is confined to just a few suburbs.
“For the Gold Coast, given there is a limitation in land availability, there will need to be greater density across the region.”
Ms Conisbee said higher density did not always mean high-rises, but “more townhouses and lower-scale apartment blocks”.
“That’s probably the key for the Gold Coast. The reality is you can’t stop population growth and you can’t lock people out of the Gold Coast. It’s not possible.
“People like living on the Gold Coast, it’s the place to be and fundamentally it (population growth) drives the economy as well.”
Southport MP Rob Molhoek said the city needed far greater investment in public housing from the state government, plus higher densities along the light rail line.
“We need higher density where we’ve got great public transport. We need more high density around Helensvale station, around Nerang station,” he said. “We should be encouraging more density along the light rail corridor.
“But I don’t think three-storey walk-ups and four-storey buildings through the back lots of Southport or Labrador are a good idea because there’s not the public transport to get people around.”
Mr Molhoek said the Gold Coast was in “grave danger” of creating a “Monte Carlo effect” – whereby people on average incomes could not afford to live in the city – if more was not done to address the housing crisis.
“That’s why I fought so hard for the light rail,” he said.
“When the roads are full – and we’re seeing that now with Smith St congested at peak hour on a daily basis – people are not going to want to drive all the way to Surfers Paradise or Broadbeach to provide home-care services or work in restaurants and pubs where they might only be getting four-hour shifts and 20 bucks an hour,” he said.
“I think all of that’s linked. We’re in grave danger of creating a Monte Carlo in effect where there’s nowhere for the blue-collar workers to live and work.”
Mr Molhoek said that over the last decade the Gold Coast had been “short-changed” more than $350m by the state government on public housing spending – the equivalent of about 1000 homes.
“Since 2010 the state has invested $5.055bn in the construction, acquisition, upgrades and capital grants for Public and Community Housing,” he said.
“The Gold Coast’s share of that has been $254m – which is five per cent. Our population is 12 per cent of the total in Queensland. On this basis we should have received at the very least $606m.”
‘Scared the hell out of me’: Snake catcher’s rental shock
POPULAR snake catcher Tony Harrison has revealed how he almost lost his business after being told in June he had six weeks to leave his rental home.
Mr Harrison says he is still recovering from the stress of trying to find somewhere for himself, wife Brooke and their son Jensen to live – along with hundreds of reptiles.
“You can imagine the average family that has one cat or one dog, that sort of thing is causing issues. We had 330 reptiles because of my job,” he said.
“Where we were living, we were promised we would be there for seven years at least and they suddenly said, ‘nah nah nah, we’re going to up your rent and you’ve got to get out’.
“I’ve gone, ‘I’ve only got six weeks, six weeks to find a house, buy it and move all of our stuff. This can’t possibly happen’. I was thinking ‘no way’.
“Just because my broker and my accountant did some unbelievable magic, we managed to buy a place and we did move and we are happy and everything worked out, just by the skin of our teeth.”
Mr Harrison, who had been saving a deposit, was able to buy a house on five acres in Logan, accepting the keys in August.
But he said he knew of many people who had not been so lucky.
“There’s friends of mine who have ended up all of a sudden living in a tent,” he said.
“I’m seeing everywhere good people, they have good jobs, about to live in a tent. People with kids, living in a car.
“It’s terrible, it’s scary. The stress that I felt when I was told I had to move out, because I had resigned to the fact that I was going to have to sell all my animals, give up my business, just get the first thing I possibly could take.
“Even though I’ve got a house, and everything’s beautiful, I’m still getting over that stress. It scared the hell out of me.
“It would have cost me my livelihood, it would have cost me a lot.”
Mr Harrison’s experience has become increasingly common on the Gold Coast, with the Bulletin this week revealing that median rental prices now outstrip those in Sydney.
Homeless services on the Gold Coast told the Bulletin they had seen a “sharp increase” in working people forced to live in cars or tents as a result of the crisis.
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