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).
Paine Schwartz joins BERO as a new investor as the year-old company seeks to triple sales.
The sports-car maker delivered 279,449 cars last year, down from 310,718 in 2024.
In a series of social-media posts, the eldest child of David and Victoria Beckham threw stones at the image of a ‘perfect family’.
3 min
David Beckham was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday with Bank of America chief executive Brian Moynihan to promote their new partnership. But all anyone wanted to talk about was his son.
After the obligatory questions about business and the World Cup, a host on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” lobbed Beckham an out-of-left-field query about how young people can preserve their mental health in the age of social media.
“Children are allowed to make mistakes,” Beckham, 50, said. “That’s how they learn. So, that’s what I try to teach my kids, but you have to sometimes let them make those mistakes as well.”
Just a day earlier, his 26-year-old son Brooklyn Beckham had posted a series of accusations about his soccer-famous father and pop-star-turned-fashion-designer mother, Victoria Beckham.
He said that his parents had controlled him for years, lied about him to the press and sought to damage his relationship with his wife, Nicola Peltz Beckham. Their goal, he said, was to affect the image of a “perfect family.”
“My family values public promotion and endorsements above all else,” he wrote on Instagram. “Brand Beckham comes first.”
That brand has been burnished over decades of professional triumphs, tabloid scandals and slick dealmaking.
Recently, both David and Victoria Beckham put their legacies on-screen in docuseries that cast them as hardworking entrepreneurs and devoted parents. Their image appeared stronger than ever. Now their firstborn child is throwing stones.
Representatives for David Beckham, Victoria Beckham and Brooklyn Beckham did not respond to requests for comment. A representative for Nicola Peltz Beckham declined to comment.
In the U.K., the Beckhams are as close as you can get to royalty without sharing Windsor DNA. David is perhaps the most famous English player in soccer history, while Victoria parlayed her Spice Girls fame into a career as a respected fashion designer.
Their partnership was forged in the cauldron of 1990s celebrity gossip, with their every move—in their careers, their bumpy personal lives and their adventurous senses of personal style—subject to tabloid scrutiny.
“They were Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce before Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce,” said Elaine Lui, founder of the website Lainey Gossip.
Over time, the couple became savvy managers of their own brand, a sprawling modern empire including a professional soccer team, fashion and beauty lines, investment deals and commercial partnerships.
In recent years they each released a Netflix docuseries—“Beckham” in 2023, “Victoria Beckham” in 2025—featuring scenes from their private family life. (Brooklyn and Nicola appeared in David’s series, but not Victoria’s.)
“The way they’ve performed their celebrity has been togetherness,” Lui said: Appearing and engaging with the world as a happily married couple, in both relative calm and amid scandal. And as their family grew, their four children became smiling ambassadors for Brand Beckham, too.
Until Monday night. In a series of Instagram Story posts, Brooklyn accused his parents of “trying endlessly to ruin” his marriage to Nicola, an actress and model, and the daughter of billionaire investor Nelson Peltz . Brooklyn declared, “I do not want to reconcile with my family.”
Where Victoria and David seemed to see press scrutiny as part of the job, Brooklyn and Nicola are operating in a manner more typical of their own generation. Brooklyn’s posts call to mind the “no contact” boundaries some children have enforced with their parents in recent years to much pop-psych chatter.
Andrew Friedman, managing director of crisis communications at Orchestra, said he’d advised many clients through family drama. “Going public,” he said, should be a “last resort.”
He’s also warned clients that using social media to air grievances opens a can of worms. “Nuance is not welcome in social-media feeding frenzies,” Friedman said. “Sensational and unusual details will overshadow the central issue.”
Brooklyn, the eldest of the Beckhams’ four children, has built a following in his parents’ image, though without the benefit (or burden) of a steady career.
He’s worked as a model, photographer, cooking-show host and most recently founded a hot-sauce brand. Brooklyn and Nicola went public with their relationship in 2020 and married in a lavish 2022 ceremony at her family estate in Palm Beach, Fla.
Rumors of a family feud flared almost immediately after the wedding, including whispers about the fact that Nicola didn’t wear a dress made by her fashion-designer mother-in-law.
Brooklyn on Monday recounted further grievances related to a mother-son dance and the seating chart. In the months and years that followed, celebrity journalists and fans closely tracked both generations of the family, looking for cracks in the relationship.
But official dispatches from Beckham World suggested that things were just fine. In a scene from the final episode of David’s Netflix series, the Beckham family, including Brooklyn and Nicola, joke around on a visit to their country home. It’s a picture of familial bliss.
“We’ve tried to give our children the most normal upbringing as possible. But you’ve got a dad that was England captain and a mom that was Posh Spice,” David says in voice-over.
“And they could be little s—s. And they’re not. And that’s why I say I’m so proud of my children, and I’m so in awe of my children, the way they’ve turned out.”
Micro-needling promises glow and firmness, but timing can make all the difference.
Australia’s market is on the move again, and not always where you’d expect. We’ve found the surprise suburbs where prices are climbing fastest.
