Rental crisis Australia: International students share struggles to find homes as long term structural issues blamed in new report
Overseas students say they are unfairly being blamed for the rental housing crisis, saying they too have struggled to find accommodation or fallen victim to unscrupulous landlords.
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University students from overseas say they are unfairly being blamed for the rental housing crisis and that they too have struggled to find suitable accommodation or fallen victim to unscrupulous landlords.
A new report released by the Student Accommodation Council aims to take the heat off international students, who the organisation argues are not to blame for Australia’s ongoing rental crisis.
Despite Department of Education figures showing 463,148 international students flooding into the country last year and a record 582,636 this year, the report shows just 4 per cent of the rental market was made up of international students, with domestic students accounting for 6.2 per cent.
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“International students have been unfairly blamed for the rental crisis, yet this report shows that long term structural issues in Australia’s housing market are the real cause for rental pressures,” said executive director of the Student Accommodation Council Torie Brown.
Median household rents rose 24 per cent from 2019-2023, while only four per cent more international students lived in Australia.
Between June and October 2023, there was an 18 per cent increase in international students entering the country, while median rents rose just five per cent.
The report also pinpointed local government areas (LGAs) where international students made up at least 10 per cent of the renter’s market. These include Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Hobart as well as more suburban LGAs such as the Strathfield in New South Wales and Monash in Victoria.
Ms Brown said there were many factors affecting housing supply, including the 13 per cent of renters who choose to be “lone person households”.
“One of the biggest things that’s happened is people have started to repurpose their second and third bedrooms as home offices. Previously they would have someone renting their spare room as a flatmate,” Ms Brown said.
High construction costs and migration out of the cities to more regional areas have also contributed to the rental crisis.
Ms Brown said the solution to helping ease housing supply issues lay in building more purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA).
Currently just 7770 new PBSA beds are due to be delivered by 2026, but Ms Brown said 66,000 beds are needed to keep up with demand.
Daniel Wild, deputy executive director of the Institute of Public Affairs agreed international students were not entirely to blame for the country’s one per cent vacancy rate, however they still added unneeded pressure to housing supply.
“There needs to be a dramatic reduction to overall demand pressures in the market, primarily coming from overseas migration, in order to have a stop gap in the short term.
“You can’t increase housing construction overnight, it will take a number of years,” Mr Wild said.
Anouk Darling, chair of the Student Accommodation Council and CEO of Scape said getting new PBSA buildings off the ground was a challenge.
“The difficulties faced by the sector include slow planning systems, high property taxes and clunky state-based legislation.”
Singaporean student Kate Griese lives on campus at Griffiths University on the Gold Coast and said international students were at a disadvantage when it came to finding a rental, with domestic students having the option to live at home.
She said other international students in her community had come up against rental agents and landlords who made it exceedingly difficult for them to find somewhere to live.
“They have faced unfair biases from landlords, such as asking for several months of advanced payment to ensure the landlord that us as tenants, would be able to afford the rent.”
Ronan Xu found out he was accepted to the University of Sydney just one month before classes started and had difficulty finding a suitable property before coming across a PBSA provider.
“A lot of the options were shared apartments, but I really wanted my own space. So, I started looking at places off campus, but those social rentals didn’t come with any furniture, and I couldn’t check them out before flying over to Australia.”
“I turned my attention to fully furnished student places and stumbled upon Scape,” he said.
Zhi Sheng Low, a student at the University of Queensland struggled to find suitable accommodation in Brisbane.
“I had initially started looking for an apartment with two other friends before coming to Australia for my studies, but we were rejected and could not find a place for over a year. I was forced to sign with a college, where I met my future roommate friends; these friends and I moved into Scape a year ago and we have been here since.”
Indian student Janvi Pandya is studying a Master of Health Services Management at the University of South Australia and had to search for accommodation in Adelaide while still in India.
“When you come to a new country there are plenty of things to stress about from getting your bank account sorted to figuring out how the public transportation works to finding a job so I feel housing shouldn’t be an added stress,” she said.
Sruthi Sundharesan, a student at The Australian College of Arts in Melbourne said it was much easier to find a rental within a PBSA, which suited her needs.
“Despite similar rents, residential properties lacked amenities and didn’t meet my preference for living alone. Opting for student accommodation spared me the hassle of furnishing and additional bills,” she said.
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