Why the cost of renting a city apartment is now on par with houses

The median asking rent for an apartment in Australia’s capital cities is now on par with houses at $600 per week. This follows an extraordinary almost 25 percent surge in city apartment rents over the past year alone, compared with a 13.2 percent lift in house rents, according to Domain’s September quarter rent report.

The report’s findings are remarkable given units have reliably offered cheaper accommodation than houses historically. The $600 per week median was recorded across the combined capital cities, whereas in regional areas, median unit rents are still well below houses at $450 per week compared to $520 per week. The report reveals the Australian market has gone through the longest period of continuous rental price growth on record. The September quarter marked the 10th consecutive quarter of house rental growth (up 3.4 percent)and the 9th consecutive quarter of unit rental growth (also up 3.4 percent).

Apartment rents have surged the most over the past year in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, where weekly rents have risen by about 20 percent to record highs of $680, $520 and $550, respectively. Unit rents are also at a record high in Adelaide at $450 and Perth at $500. Across the other capitals, median unit rents are $450 in Hobart, $520 in Darwin and $550 in Canberra.

The key traditional drivers in Australia’s long-term shift to apartment living have been greater supply of apartments than houses, especially in popular urban suburbs with major infrastructure, and comparative affordability. Another factor is the increasing number of Australians living alone. Some are younger people who are increasingly delaying marriage until later in life. Australia also has an ageing population, so there is a rising number of older people living alone following the death of a spouse or the end of a marriage.

Exacerbating current demand for apartments is an undersupply. New apartment approvals have fallen to their lowest levels in a decade, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Approvals have dropped by 15.8 percent over the past year amid the construction industry grappling with a shortage of materials and labour.

Domain’s rent report also showed that record weekly house rents were reached or sustained in Sydney at a median of $720, Melbourne at $550, Brisbane at $590, Adelaide at $550, Perth at $600, and Darwin at $650 during the September quarter. In the other capitals, median house rents are $530 in Hobart and $655 in Canberra.

Canberra was the only city not recording a record unit or house rental value over the quarter. Interestingly, the ACT is the only state or territory with a rental cap in place. The cap limits landlords to annual rental increases at the territory’s CPI rate for rents plus 10%. The Federal Greens recently lobbied for a temporary cap across Australia to help tenants cope with a runaway market, but Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said such propositions were a matter for each state and territory to consider separately.

Domain chief of research and economics, Dr Nicola Powell said the previous “extreme paces” of rental price growth had now ended but they were still relatively high. Dr Powell estimates that Australia needs 40,000 to 70,000 more rental homes right now to balance the market. “This is a significant amount of rental stock needed to balance out the rental market today, and not taking into account future population growth and people arriving from overseas and people relocating,” Dr Powell said.

New CoreLogic data shows rental vacancy rates have fallen to new record lows of 1 percent across the combined capital cities and 1.2 percent across the combined regional markets. CoreLogic economist Kaytlin Ezzy said: “Record high net overseas migration, fuelled by a combination of an increased flow of new arrivals and weaker departure numbers, coupled with a continued shortfall in rental listings, saw the vacancy rates falling to new record lows.”

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.”

Why the cost of renting a city apartment is now on par with houses

A perfect storm of changing demographics and construction delays is increasing demand in Australia

The Republican nominee says it would help bring down home prices, though these buyers account for a fraction of U.S. home sales