Australia’s never-ending rental crisis

As 2023 is well and truly underway the demand for rentals has never been higher. With some of the lowest ever availability for rentals and new homes, it really is a strange time.

While wages stagnate both property prices and rent seem to be strangely increasing in conjunction. It seems weird that we are seeing continuously rising property prices even looking back on a major slowdown in sales in 2022 compared to the fire sale of 2021. While we can predict demand has slowed heavily due to the rate increases the slow-down in 2022 was also due to an undersupply of new homes.

Take Queensland for example, Master Builders Queensland has recently released a report stating that the state is only going to hit their target of 200 000 new home starts in 2026. This means they are to expect demand to far out way supply for 3 more years.

While builders are still facing the challenges Covid caused, having to defer many projects until later this 2023. This all seems to be a recipe for the chaos we are experiencing.

These days everyone and their dog has an investment property and these rate increases seem to be starting to hurt. We haven’t seen a massive increase of properties hitting the market and it is worth keeping an eye on the homes for sale in the coming months as there might be a few good deals coming to the market if over-leveraged property investors need to liquidate.