The latest Rental Affordability Index (RAI) figures released this week show “unsustainable rent increases” have helped place virtually all of the Sunshine Coast under rental stress.
The index regards spending anything above 30 per cent of income on housing as representing “a situation of rental stress” – and much of the coast is rated above that to varying levels.
The release of the challenging data follows ongoing campaigning on the Sunshine Coast by Mal Cayley of Homes for Everyone, for greater awareness and united action to address the housing stress crisis.
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“Regional Queensland has had a real decline in rental affordability between 2020 and 2022 – and that was very strong during that Covid period – so it’s now actually the least affordable area in Australia,” Kishan Ratnam, of SGS Economics and Planning, which helps compile the index, said in an interview with Sunshine Coast News.
“…between 2020 and 2022, it’s fallen to the point where, in some of the worst affected areas – say Noosa Heads – a household earning an average income for a regional Queensland household – that’s about $90,000 per year – they’d be looking to spend 45 per cent of that income on rent, if they manage to find a place at the median rental rate, which really puts pressure on people being able to afford all sorts of other primary needs like food, medicine, education for the kids.
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“The situation was similar from around Caloundra up to Mooloolaba and Maroochydore – those areas that experienced a similar trend in that 2020/2022 period, which is quite bad,” Mr Ratnam explained.
“…that area from Caloundra to Maroochydore … an average Queensland regional household is spending more than 30 per cent – so around 35 per cent to 40 per cent – of their income on rent.
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“In 2021, there were 12,000 people moved from capital cities to regional parts of the country, nationwide … if you compare it to the number of people that live in regional towns, it’s a big proportion, and given that it happened in such a short space of time, it puts pressure on the amount of supply there.”
Mr Ratnam said it was difficult to predict how things might develop on the Coast over the next few months.
“What we are seeing in a lot of the capital cities is that the trends that happened during those heavy COVID years of 2020/21 have started to reverse, but for regional Queensland, and Caloundra through to Maroochydore and Noosa Heads, that hasn’t seemed to have happened. We haven’t seen that uptick in affordability yet.”
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SGS Economics and Planning also reiterated the knock-on effect that key workers, including teachers, nurses, and hospitality workers, are struggling to afford the rental costs in the towns where they work.
In a recent edition of his Homes for Everyone podcast, Mr Cayley spoke to Paul Morton, of Integrated Family Youth Service (IFYS), where he noted “a scary number of youth risking their safety and enduring physical and mental abuse just to be able to have a bed to sleep in”.
“The average young person that we work with has usually come out of a crisis and is
disengaged from family so, when you compound that with rents of $500 and $600 a week in a hot property market, young people aren’t going to be high on the list for approval of a property,” Mr Morton said.
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“People are turning to couch surfing or sleeping in tents on properties and sadly, the horrible and insidious side of this is that these people will often end up in unhealthy relationships where they are having to do all kinds of things to survive, to get a feed in their belly, or for accommodation for the night.”
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