00:01The term used to mean that the vacancy rate is below the healthy level of around 3%.
00:09And to be honest, we haven't been outside of the landlord's market for many years now,
00:14decades in reality, because what it's supposed to indicate is that the landlords are able
00:22to pick and choose their tenants, set conditions, set prices, and tenants have to essentially
00:28accept that that's the market dynamic.
00:31And from that lens, it's been many, many years, decades, 50, 60 years, since it's truly been
00:39a tenants market.
00:40So, it becomes a sort of a meaningless term we really need to see, like in other healthier
00:47markets, a situation where the consumer, the customer, is expressing their demand, their
00:54choices, and getting those demands met.
00:57Sydney has seen the largest quarterly rent increase in four years in this latest data.
01:04I know I've just been notified my rent's going up.
01:06I'm certainly not the only one.
01:08Why are rents climbing so high?
01:11And what is it about the Sydney market?
01:13So, this domain data measures the rents.
01:17They're asking rents for new leases, so that they're out for market for applications.
01:23And they're always a bit higher than what people are paying for the home that they're currently
01:28sitting in.
01:29But these numbers do influence how rent increases for sitting tenants are sought.
01:35Fundamentally, there are not enough homes that meet the needs and wants of tenants in
01:42the locations that they need.
01:44And that includes, you know, the number of bedrooms, the kinds of configuration that people are
01:50after, particularly as we get into areas of higher demand, central Sydney, but also anywhere
01:57where there's really good amenity, close to jobs, community connections, where people have
02:02grown up, where their families are.
02:04If there's competition, there's too many people seeking not enough homes.
02:09That's what pushes prices up.
02:11And we can see that across the country with extremely low vacancy rates in essentially
02:16every capital city.
02:17But we also see people getting to the top of what they can afford and being forced out,
02:25being displaced from where they are and pushed away from their family, their friends, their
02:29community and their work.
02:31A lot of this data that we're looking at, the numbers on the screen at the moment, are
02:36about house rental prices.
02:38But Darwin is somewhat of an outlier here in terms of the increasing cost of renting a
02:43unit.
02:43Up there, it's jumped from $600 to $650 a week for a unit.
02:49What's behind that?
02:51And why is there such a disparity between renting unit prices and houses?
02:58So, Darwin's a particular example.
03:00It's largely driven by the workforce.
03:04And there's a lot of seasonal work that comes in and out of Darwin units.
03:08There is not as many of them as houses.
03:12So, where there is shifts, they can happen quite dramatically.
03:16And so, sometimes prices are going down.
03:18Sometimes they're very flat.
03:19And then they rise very quickly.
03:22Units, there's a few things that happen across the country, particularly in the
03:26current situation where we have a lot of building, a lot of density is coming up.
03:32And newer units are usually priced more expensively than existing units.
03:38And even sometimes houses in a big city like Sydney, the units in the inner city can be
03:43more expensive than the houses further out.
03:46And so, they can really push prices up.
03:49And they can look like they're racing very quickly.
03:53It's often because of new properties coming onto the market.
03:57You mentioned a little earlier there, Leo, about, you know, people reaching sort of the
04:02cap of what they can afford when it comes to their rental going up and sort of being forced out.
04:09What sort of rights do renters have when it comes to the increasing cost of a home that
04:14they've been in, you know, say, for quite some time?
04:18So, outside of Canberra, outside of the ACT, the rules are essentially very similar.
04:24And they are...
04:25The landlord can ask for any amount that they think that they can get for that property.
04:31There is guidance.
04:32And you can usually go to a tribunal or a similar magistrates courts in some jurisdictions
04:38to challenge that increase if you think that the evidence of comparable, similar properties
04:45in the area doesn't support that level of increase.
04:50But that's a lot of work for a renter to do.
04:52And if rents are increasing as quickly as we see in these kind of data, that may not be any
04:59support. It may be that that size increase is supported by the data.
05:04And so, often what people have been doing historically is moving.
05:10When we see these kind of price rises for, as we are in Sydney particularly, for new properties,
05:18the option of moving becomes much less available.
05:21And so, people are staying put, trying to cope with that increase.
05:26And we're talking here about an increase of, you know, $70 over the last year.
05:31That's $3,500 of your annual budget that you need to find.
05:37Wages haven't increased that quickly.
05:39And so, people have to find other ways of resolving this issue.
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