Jackie was sick of the Sydney rental market, so she moved to London
Jackie Olling is among the thousands of young professionals leaving Sydney every year - for places even more expensive. Yet she is well in front.
Jackie Olling swapped Sydney for London, where she pays more rent but is much better off. Credit: JAIMI JOY
Jackie Olling swapped Darlinghurst for London’s East End last year, realising the ambition she dreamt about in the years of pandemic lockdowns.
Olling, 31, was paying $400 per week for her two-bedroom Darlinghurst terrace, just behind Oxford Street. She now lives a few kilometres from the London namesake, with the $65 in additional rent easily offset by the 50 per cent pay rise she secured landing a marketing job in the UK.
“Like many Australians, I always had moving overseas in the back of my mind,” Olling said. “Lots felt the need to get out [after COVID], and it made me realise if I don’t do it now I will never do it.”
Olling is among the 7000 Millennial-aged professionals leaving Sydney each year, as rising financial pressures and dwindling amenities make the case for seeking new pastures increasingly attractive. For our city, it means losing talented workers.
Now in London, Olling is a regular theatregoer and traveller who has used her leftover earnings to embark on weekend trips to seven European countries and the US in the past year.
Jade Ritchie moved to New York City with her husband Matthew in July.Credit: Ben Sklar
In a report issued to the NSW government in February, NSW Productivity Commissioner Peter Achterstraat warned that Sydney could become a “city with no grandchildren”, should the exodus of working-age professionals continue.
Among the other young professionals to leave Sydney are Jade Ritchie and her husband Matthew, both 31, who started life on the Lower East Side of Manhattan last July. They paid $1300 a week for their Sydney apartment near Town Hall, which is cheaper than their New York home, but each take home 40 per cent more than they did in Australia.
Since moving to New York, Ritchie, who works in market research, regularly travels across the US for live music festivals and gigs, and spoke to the Herald from London, where she travelled on a $150 airfare.
“You feel like you’re closer to the centre of the world in a lot of ways,” Ritchie said. “Sometimes we have three or four live shows we want to go to in a night, whereas in Sydney we’d be losing our minds if one of those bands was on.”
Genevieve Heggarty moved to Sydney in 2018.Credit: Nick Moir
Ritchie has also enjoyed immersing herself in New York’s food scene, and is a regular at baseball games at Yankee Stadium in The Bronx.
“You can find the best versions of every cuisine in New York, for the same price as an underwhelming café in Sydney,” Ritchie said. “Only the best stuff seems to survive, so the quality is really good.”
Genevieve Heggarty, a 25-year-old ecologist who moved to Sydney from the Blue Mountains six years ago to start university, has noticed Sydney increasingly becoming a stopgap destination for young people keen to gain qualifications and build a career before finding a more financially stable lifestyle.
“I’m seeing this trend with all of my friends that I grew up with, where we moved to Sydney as a temporary situation where we’re studying, we start our careers, and then we’re leaving,” Heggarty said. “It’s not a long-term plan to move to the city and stay in Sydney.”
NSW Housing Minister Rose Jackson has called a shortage of intellectual capital in Sydney a “major concern”, but said that adding more affordable housing for young people cannot be solved overnight.
“It is of huge concern to the government that we do everything we can, as quickly as we can, to make Sydney a place where young people want to stay,” Jackson said. “To the extent that we can make reforms quickly, we are doing that and we are investing in the long-term plans as well.”
Among the young professionals considering an exodus from Sydney is Zachary Moore, a 23-year-old urban planning student who moved to Penrith from Newcastle to begin his studies.
While entering a field with competitive wages, Moore doesn’t think he’ll be able to buy in Sydney, and has considered moving interstate or back to Newcastle to find a secure home.
“We’re already starting to see that brain drain … either wages need to increase a lot, or house prices need to go down a lot,” Moore said. “I might end up just going back to Newcastle, but even then, there are so few opportunities there. So my choice is either Sydney, Melbourne or Newcastle.”
Krish Raja, 37, and his partner left Sydney in August after their Coogee rental was sold for “silly money”. Now settled in New York, he commented that Sydney had “some of the costs of New York, but not the income”.
“An account manager in New York can earn a similar amount to a business leader in Australia ... it’s levels different,” Raja said.
“Buying was our next logical step, and that just became untenable in Sydney.”