Sydney nearing shocking rental milestone

Sydney rental homes are moving towards a troubling new milestone.

Data from July shows Sydney houses creeping closer to a median weekly rent of $1000 per week. Picture: Jeremy Piper

Sydney is continuing to creep towards the $1000 per week mark for weekly house rents with expert advice pointing towards regional moves.

Data released by SQM Research from July revealed that Sydney remains the most expensive market in Australia by almost $400 a week with the national median asking rent at $578.63 a week.

“The most expensive rent is Sydney houses at $963.92 a week,” SQM Research managing director Christopher Louis said.

The data showed that Sydney also recorded a decrease in rental vacancy rates in July, standing at 1.6 per cent.

Long line ups continue across Sydney will low vacancy rates and fierce competition. Picture: Jeremy Piper

SQM managing director Louis Christopher said the July results were disappointing for tenants.

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“Notably, the rental vacancy rate in the Sydney CBD fell back to 5 per cent after recording recurring month on month increases since March 2023,” Mr Louis said.

“After the slight easing in vacancies over the first half 2023, this is somewhat of a disappointing result for tenants.

“Clearly, acute rental shortages remain with us. And besides more people grouping together to share the burden, there is no significant solution on the horizon.”

Mr Louis said there was “no significant solution” on the horizon to ease rental stress.

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Mr Louis said he would recommend tenants consider moving to regional areas if their work commitments allowed them to be remote.

According to the SQM data, the majority of regional areas recorded stable rental vacancy rates. The NSW north coast remained at 1.8 per cent, however the Blue Mountains dropped to 1.5 per cent.

“I also encourage discussion about temporary migration caps, rather than rental caps, which will only make the rental crisis worse over the medium term,” he said.

“This problem has not been instigated by so called, greedy landlords.

“Rather, it has been driven by rampant population growth. Australia currently has, by far, the fastest growing population for any OECD country and clearly the rampant increases are currently breaching the country’s capacity to house all our people.”

The national rental vacancy rates was at 1.3 per cent as of July 2023, with the count at 38,864 properties across Australia.

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Originally published as Sydney nearing shocking rental milestone