Beautiful one day, pricey the next
Low vacancy rates and rising rents make life tough on tenants in the Sunshine State while investors see strong capital growth
2 min
Renters in Queensland are experiencing the greatest rental pressure in the country, new data shows.
The Rental Pain Index released by content and research provider Suburbtrends shows the Sunshine State has seen the highest average rental increase in 12 months across the country at 16.33 percent.
“The significant increase in rental prices over the past year in Queensland is a clear contributor to the heightened rental pain felt by residents,” said founder of Suburbtrends, Kent Lardner. “Similar trends are observed in South Australia and Western Australia, where rental prices have risen by approximately 15.95 percent and 15.37 percent, respectively.”
The findings are the result of analysis of the top 25 rental results in each state comparing advertised rentals, vacancy rates and average rent increases over a 12 month period. It also examines average rents as a percentage of income.
The report comes on the back of data released by Ray White Real Estate which reveals that unit prices in Brisbane are growing at a faster pace than houses.
Ray White chief economist Nerida Conisbee said unit price growth has kept pace with that of houses, with apartment prices now back to their 2022 peak. She attributed the recent downturn in apartment prices to the lockdown lifestyle of the pandemic.
“Apartment living wasn’t much fun during lockdowns. Living in smaller spaces with restricted movement was difficult and a lot of the best things about urban living were not available,” Ms Conisbee said.
“Now that things are pretty much back to normal, apartment living is again attractive. Most of us are going back to the office more frequently and all the best things about living in higher density suburbs are back.
“We have moved quickly from a situation where there were too many apartments to not enough. Demand is exceeding supply, driving up prices and rents.”
Ms Conisbee noted that demand for apartments would continue to outstrip supply as building approvals were at their lowest point in more than a decade while construction costs were at record highs.
She said the future of the Australian residential market was apartment living, which is not reflected in current housing stock around the country.
“Australia has extremely low density relative to other major cities,” Ms Conisbee said. “Sydney is our highest density city but half of all homes are still detached houses. In Hobart, just 15 percent of homes are attached or apartments.”
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The Republican nominee says it would help bring down home prices, though these buyers account for a fraction of U.S. home sales
3 min
Former President Donald Trump said he would ban undocumented immigrants from obtaining home mortgages, a move he indicated would help ease home prices even though these buyers account for a tiny fraction of U.S. home sales.
Home loans to undocumented people living in the U.S. are legal but they aren’t especially common. Between 5,000 and 6,000 mortgages of this kind were issued last year, according to estimates from researchers at the Urban Institute in Washington.
Overall, lenders issued more than 3.4 million mortgages to all home purchasers in 2023, federal government data show.
Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, made his comments Thursday during a policy speech to the Economic Club of New York in Manhattan.
Housing remains a top economic issue for voters during this presidential election. Rent and home prices grew at historic rates during the pandemic and mortgage rates climbed to levels not seen in more than two decades. A July Wall Street Journal poll showed that voters rank housing as their second-biggest inflation concern after groceries.
Both major candidates for the 2024 presidential election have made appeals to voters on housing during recent campaign stops, though the issue has so far featured more prominently in Vice President Kamala Harris ’s campaign.
Trump has blamed immigrants for many of the nation’s woes, including crime and unemployment. Now, he is pointing to immigrants as a cause of the nation’s housing-affordability crisis. Yet some affordable-housing advocates and real-estate professionals said Trump’s mortgage proposal would fail to bring relief to priced-out home buyers.
“It’s unfortunate that given the significant housing affordability crisis that is widely acknowledged across most partisan lines, we are arguing about a minuscule segment of the market,” said David Dworkin, president of the National Housing Conference, an affordable-housing advocacy group.
Gary Acosta, chief executive of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, a trade organization, said, “It’s just another effort to vilify immigrants and to continue to scapegoat them for any issues that we have here in the United States.”
A Trump campaign spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Undocumented immigrants in the U.S. can obtain an obscure type of mortgage designed for taxpayers without Social Security numbers, most of whom are Hispanic. The passage of the USA Patriot Act of 2001 allowed banks to use identification numbers from the Internal Revenue Service as an alternative to Social Security, extending a number of financial services to people without legal status for the first time.
Mortgage loans for undocumented immigrants are typically higher interest and borrowers include legal residents who have undocumented spouses, Acosta said. Lenders include regional credit unions and community-development financial institutions.
In his speech, Trump said that “the flood” of undocumented immigrants is driving up housing costs. “That’s why my plan will ban mortgages for illegal aliens,” he said.
Trump didn’t elaborate on how he would enact a ban on such loans.
Though mortgages for undocumented people living in the U.S. are relatively rare, residential real-estate purchases by foreign nationals are big business , especially in expensive coastal cities such as New York and Los Angeles. These sales have declined in recent years, however.
Close to half of foreign purchases are made by people residing abroad, while the other half are made by recent immigrants or residents on nonimmigrant visas, according to an annual survey by the National Association of Realtors. Many affluent foreigners buy U.S. homes with cash instead of obtaining mortgage financing.
In his Thursday speech, which focused mostly on other economic matters such as energy and taxation, Trump proposed other measures to bring down housing costs, including cutting regulations for builders and allowing more building on federal land. Similar ideas appeared in the housing policy outline Harris released in August .
The former president has spoken on housing-related issues in speeches at other recent campaign stops, including in Michigan last month, where he touted his administration’s 2020 overturn of a policy that had encouraged cities to reduce racial segregation .
“I keep the suburbs safe,” Trump said. “I stopped low-income towers from rising right alongside of their house. And I’m keeping the illegal aliens away from the suburbs.”
This stylish family home combines a classic palette and finishes with a flexible floorplan
Just 55 minutes from Sydney, make this your creative getaway located in the majestic Hawkesbury region.
