Homeowners’ Spare Rooms Worth $700 A Month In Today’s Rental Crisis
Rising mortgage costs and the rental housing shortage have combined to create strong demand for spare room accommodation
3 min
Thousands of Australian homeowners are renting out spare rooms amid the rising cost of living, anaemic wages growth and a national shortage of rental homes. A survey by consumer company Finder shows 9% of respondents – extrapolated to more than 600,000 householders — are renting out their spare rooms. They’re making an average of $667 per month or $167 per week by renting out the spare room.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 77% of households have at least one spare bedroom that they could rent out during today’s rental housing crisis. CoreLogic estimates there is currently a rental housing shortfall of 47,500 homes, making it difficult for many Australians to find a rental home amid weekly rents increase by 30% over the past three years as a result. Meanwhile, homeowners are grappling with large increases in loan repayments due to rapid-fire interest rate rises. The combination of these two problems is creating a strong market for spare-room renting, with apps such as flatmates.com.au and AirBnb facilitating connections.
Finder’s money expert Richard Whitten said: “For many Aussies, living with a roommate is better than the consequences of missed repayments. It’s also a good opportunity to create an extra revenue stream. You could be missing out on thousands of dollars by not making use of your extra room. If you do decide to go ahead with it, you’ll need landlord insurance to be covered. Home insurance doesn’t typically cover damage caused by tenants.”
The number of householders living in larger homes than they require is a structural problem in the Australian housing market that was raised by former Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe at a Senate hearing in May.
During the pandemic, many householders switched from smaller forms of accommodation in inner city areas, such as apartments, to larger suburban houses on the city outskirts or in the regions because they were allowed to work from home. The number of people renting share housing also fell as people sought their own space to make working from home more comfortable and to cope with long periods of lockdown.
Now, Dr Lowe says rising interest rates and rents will force people to “economise on housing”. “The way that this ends up fixing itself, unfortunately, is through higher housing prices and higher rents,” Dr Lowe said. “Because as rents go up people decide not to move out of home, or you don’t have that home office, you [get] a flatmate. That’s the price mechanism at work. We need more people on average to live in each dwelling, and prices do that,” he said.
Dr Lowe said strong population growth would exacerbate the housing shortage, and rents would continue to rise. This means demand for accommodation, including spare rooms, is likely to remain high. “We’re going to have 2 percent more people in the country this year, [but] the capital stock is not increasing by 2 percent,” he said.
Rents have risen by 10% in capital cities and 4.1% in the regions over the past 12 months.
Renting it out is the latest method used by homeowners to derive an income from their homes. An explosion in short-stay accommodation apps over the past decade has also seen many homeowners renting separate living quarters or studios at their homes to short-term holidaymakers or travelling executives. In addition, the Finder survey found that 5% of the population – or more than 300,000 people – are renting out a garage. Australian websites such as Parkhouse, Parking Made Easy and Space Out are enabling homeowners to rent parking spaces including their own driveways.
The Finder survey asked respondents about their side hustles to earn extra income amid today’s cost of living crisis brought about by the highest rate of inflation in three decades and rising interest rates. The survey found that 35% of Australians — or 7.1 million people – are earning additional income through a side hustle. ABS data shows a record number of Australians now have a second job. Popular side hustle jobs include dog walking, mystery shopping, tutoring, freelancing and ride-sharing. The favoured non-employed side hustles include recycling cans and bottles, earning an average of $46 a month, making and selling goods ($213 per month) and selling pre-owned goods ($897 per month).
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Elon Musk is exploring a potential merger between Tesla and SpaceX, a deal that could reshape the future of AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles and space technology. With a combined valuation potentially reaching $3.5 trillion, the move could bring Musk’s vision of an interconnected technology ecosystem closer to reality, although a deal remains uncertain.
5 min
Elon Musk has engineered ties between Tesla TSLA 3.41%increase; up pointing triangle and SpaceX SPCX 7.79%increase; up pointing triangle that are hard to break, and now he wants to fuse them together permanently.
Musk has run both Tesla and SpaceX concurrently over the past two decades, using a schedule that dictated which days he spent focused on each business.
The companies have often shared resources and personnel, signaling their close ties. Last year, SpaceX looked into creating a spacesuit for Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus, a person familiar with the matter said. Tesla last week showed off its new Roadster, a vehicle featuring SpaceX rocket thrusters that it hopes to soon bring to market.
And in recent months, Musk has repositioned both companies by expanding beyond their core operations toward a shared mission centered on artificial intelligence.
The world’s richest man on Tuesday signaled his interest in tying up SpaceX and Tesla, marking what would be the biggest corporate merger of all time. Because he serves as chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, Musk said committees of independent directors at both companies are evaluating a possible deal, adding that a transaction might not come to fruition.
The committees will likely evaluate, with lawyers and bankers, how each company would fare in a potential deal and how a deal might best be structured. They then present their conclusions to their respective boards, who typically vote on whether to proceed.
“It’s an odd Kabuki dance where two groups of people are talking and I can’t be in the conversation,” Musk told SpaceX investors on Tuesday in response to an analyst’s question about a potential deal.
For Musk, the merger supports his vision of a world full of autonomous cars, humanoid robots and weekly rocket launches, as well as the data centers and satellites required to keep the whole thing running.
Some investors and analysts said they expect a transaction would be structured as an all-stock deal, with SpaceX potentially paying a modest premium for Tesla shares.
SpaceX, which has a market value of about $2 trillion, said it is seeing sharp growth in revenue across its businesses, which include operating data centers, launching rockets and operating satellite networks such as the internet service Starlink. Tesla is valued at about $1.5 trillion and is expanding its operations beyond its automotive and energy business. Shares in both companies traded higher following the news Tuesday.
Musk’s substantial ownership stakes in both companies, along with voting control at SpaceX, has enabled him to set the deal in motion. Analysts and investors said the deal will probably face regulatory scrutiny internationally, though some see Musk’s close relationship with the Trump administration as an asset to getting approval.
Blurred lines
The companies haven’t said which directors are on the special committees evaluating a potential deal. Several SpaceX and Tesla board members have either personal or business ties to Musk. And like Musk, venture capitalist Ira Ehrenpreis sits on both boards.
In a filing this week, Tesla outlined millions of dollars in business agreements with SpaceX and its subsidiaries last year, including $143 million in car sales to SpaceX, $3.3 million in advertising that it bought on the social-media platform X and $430 million in revenue from the sale of Megapack batteries for SpaceX’s data centers.
The companies also split the cost of resources including the use of Musk’s SpaceX jet and the bill for his personal security, which he runs through a private company.
Employees at both companies routinely move between companies to work on special projects, and some executives have dual roles, including Charles Kuehmann, vice president of materials engineering at both SpaceX and Tesla, and Ashok Elluswamy, the vice president of AI software at Tesla who runs a joint venture with SpaceX called Digital Optimus.
Over the years, Musk has launched new startups within his empire, including brain-implant company Neuralink, underground-tunnel developer the Boring Company and xAI, the AI startup that merged with SpaceX in February.
It is that AI business that Musk thinks can serve a market worth tens of trillions of dollars, justifying the need for a merger.
The business case goes like this: Tesla is developing robotaxis and robots, which it calls “physical AI.” SpaceX is working on the back end of physical AI: the data-center capacity and internet connection required for those robotaxis and robots to operate continuously.
“I don’t see what the value of Tesla is if it’s not merged with SpaceX,” said investment adviser Ross Gerber, a former Tesla bull turned critic invested in both companies. “If they don’t merge, the brains of everything that runs Tesla is owned by another company.”
On top of it all, both companies face constraints on the supply chains they need to make this world a reality, particularly when it comes to chips. To address this, Musk earlier this year announced a joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX and Intel to design and manufacture chips in Texas. “The most epic chip-building exercise by far,” he has said.
Musk at the wheel
For Musk, a merger would also solve two problems: demands on his attention and his lack of control at Tesla.
Tesla for years was Musk’s only public company, a status that came with greater scrutiny. There, Musk reports to a public board, as well as individual investors who make up around 30% of Tesla’s voting power, according to FactSet.
The question of Musk’s attention became a particular focus for investors and the board in recent years after he acquired Twitter in 2022 and launched xAI in 2023, and again in 2025 as he spent time in Washington, D.C., running the Department of Government Efficiency in the early months of President Trump’s second term.
As Tesla’s car business suffered in 2025, Musk threatened to take his AI ambitions outside the company if he wasn’t granted 25% voting control. Last November, Tesla shareholders approved a new pay package for Musk, which created a path for him to vastly expand his stake.
As of Sept. 30, Musk owned a roughly 20% stake in Tesla, according to the company’s proxy filing.
The SpaceX IPO gave Musk a different path. When SpaceX went public in June, the deal’s structure enabled him to have more than 80% voting power at the company—so much that he can’t be fired and decisions can’t be made without his support.
If SpaceX acquires Tesla, he will likely stay in control.
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