‘Hunger Games’: Australian city where it’s ‘impossible’ to rent
Another Australian city has descended into total housing chaos as desperate renters battle it out to find a home.
The devastating property crisis has caused one Australian city to descend into a “Hunger Games” style of chaos as desperate renters battle it out to find a home.
Brisbane is reportedly crumbling under near-record low vacancy rates, with experts warning there is no end in sight to the state’s debilitating housing crisis.
Vulnerable tenants are bearing the brunt as they are now being slugged an average of $56 more per week than when the state government held its flagship housing summit eight months ago.
There are also fears the continued tinkering of rental reforms has spooked investors.
Now the true distressing and devastating impact of the rental crisis has been revealed, thanks to an investigation led by the Courier-Mail.
The outlet reported some real estate agents ae limiting property viewings, while many tenants were going to extreme lengths to secure a property, including submitting high-level resumes and offering cash in advance.
Many caravan parks are also reported to have zero vacancies, while some parents and their children have been forced to live in motels for months on end.
There are even people being forced to find strangers online to live with in a desperate bid to keep themselves off the streets.
Since the government’s housing summit in October 2022, the average weekly rent in Brisbane has climbed 10 per cent, from $560 to $616, or about $2900 a year.
This is more than five times the rate of Queensland Premier Anna Palaszczuk’s $550 cost-of-living relief payment.
In that time, the rental vacancy rate has barely shifted – from 0.8 per cent to 1 per cent.
The influx of international students returning to Queensland post-pandemic has also sparked concerns because the supply of rental properties will likely be further affected.
Mum-of-three Jessica Tracy Taylor revealed that she has lived in a caravan park since September 2022.
The 23-year-old said she has applied for more than 800 properties – all of which were rejected.
Despite the cramped conditions, Ms Taylor – whose youngest child is just four weeks old – was still being slugged $480 a week, stating she felt “hopeless” about finding a home for her family.
“I just didn’t know what to do anymore,” she told the Courier-Mail.
“It’s a lot of worrisome nights. You spend most of your nights crying because you just don’t know where you’re going to be the next day.
“At the moment, it’s struggling to find the money for the rent and be able to pay money for food.”
The mum, who also has a three-year-old son and a 13-month-old daughter, said before they found the caravan park, the family had no choice but to live with her partner’s family, with 12 people crammed into one house.
“We are applying for townhouses, condos, apartments, normal houses, duplexes, just anything,” she said.
“If we didn’t have my partner’s family we would have been living on the streets. We just couldn’t get approved for anything.
“It’s still been incredibly hard with prices of everything going up; rent is ridiculous.”
The Courier-Mail contacted multiple caravan parks across the state, who all confirmed that they were booked out and struggling to manage a wave of applications as the school holidays roll in.
Several parks said they were consistently operating at full capacity and receiving up to 70 phone calls a day for application requests.
Debbie Dawson, manager of Greenacre caravan park in Capalaba, revealed that none of her long-term renters were leaving because they had nowhere to go.
“I have nothing left to give,” she told the Courier-Mail.
Mother Taria Somers, 35, said she spent a frustrating two months desperately hunting for a rental, only to be knocked back from more than 50 rental properties.
“It’s deflating coming to inspections and some of them have 30 people there, so you know you’re fighting,” she told the newspaper.
“I’ve got two small children, and I feel like that really impacts on our application compared with a couple with no kids.”
She added that she had been attending viewings almost every day.
“We need to be out of our place pretty soon – I don’t know what we’ll do,” she said.
Ms Somers said that about a third of her income was going towards rent, but now it looked like it would be half or more when they found a new place to live.
Another young mum revealed her fears for the safety of her two daughters after she was forced to move into a motel.
Sky Baird, 33, has been staying in motels and couch surfing between her and her ex-partner’s parents’ homes for eight months until April.
“It was pretty rough on my daughter to be moving around schools all the time,” the single mum told the Courier-Mail.
“I tried to stay positive but there was times I couldn’t and had to face the reality of knowing I didn’t have a house.”
Skye explained that her ordeal started when her lease ended, and the owner of the property she was renting wanted to sell.
After she and her partner split, she turned to Micah Projects, who placed her and her two daughters, Shenayah, 2, and Sophia, 7, in a short-term motel for two months.
“Over that two months, I applied for about six places and got rejected every time,” she added.
“I didn’t know what was going to happen, and I felt like we would never get a place at one point.”
David Waldron, the head of property management for Burlington Property Agents, said the market was the tightest it had been in a decade, and he did not see the crisis abating soon.
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“We generally have run at a vacancy rate of 3.5-4 per cent … we are currently running at 1 per cent,” he told the publication.
“The biggest demand is in the properties, houses three bedrooms, four bedrooms, under $500 a week.
“We are getting an increase in foreign students, (and) we aren’t seeing as many people vacating their properties.”
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