Rent growth shows signs of a slowdown as renters and investors reassess
There are still strong yields to be had if you know what and where to buy
2 min
After strong yields in recent years, rent growth is set to slow across Australia next year, according to new data.
Research by property data and analytics provider CoreLogic shows after 35 consecutive increases in rent values to July this year, they have begun to slow in recent months.
The trend is most obvious in regional areas where rent values have been slowing since April last year and appear to have flattened out. In regional Tasmania, where data from 40 suburbs was analysed, rents have fallen by 47.5 percent. This was followed by regional NSW, where of the 353 suburbs analysed, 38.4 percent have recorded a decrease in rents. However, data shows the capitals have also been impacted, with more than 90 percent of Hobart suburbs recording a fall in rent over the past quarter, followed by Canberra at 88.9 percent. In Sydney’s suburbs, there’s a strong contrast between rent values for houses and apartments, with the former recording a fall of 19 percent, while apartment rent values fell just 6.9 percent.
CoreLogic Australia head of research Eliza Owen said there were several factors at play signalling that the trend would continue into 2024. A predicted decline in interest rates could encourage more investors into the market, leading to an increase in the rental supply and therefore lower rent growth. More first homebuyers might also be ready to enter the property market as confidence around the cash rate grows.
Slowing income growth, which was strong during the pandemic, could also lead some renters to reassess their decision to move into more spacious single households and back into more affordable share house options, freeing up more rental stock.
Apartments continue to represent the best yield compared with houses for investors, with significantly lower falls in rents in all Australian capitals, with the exception of Canberra and Hobart where they are in par with corresponding falls in rents for houses.
Consumers are going to gravitate toward applications powered by the buzzy new technology, analyst Michael Wolf predicts
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
A new AI-driven account by leading landscape architect Jon Hazelwood pushes the boundaries on the role of ‘complex nature’ in the future of our cities
2 min
Drifts of ground cover plants and wildflowers along the steps of the Sydney Opera House, traffic obscured by meadow-like planting and kangaroos pausing on city streets.
This is the way our cities could be, as imagined by landscape architect Jon Hazelwood, principal at multi-disciplinary architectural firm Hassell. He has been exploring the possibilities of rewilding urban spaces using AI for his Instagram account, Naturopolis_ai with visually arresting outcomes.
“It took me a few weeks to get interesting results,” he said. “I really like the ephemeral nature of the images — you will never see it again and none of those plants are real.
“The AI engine makes an approximation of a grevillea.”
Hazelwood chose some of the most iconic locations in Australia, including the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, as well as international cities such as Paris and London, to demonstrate the impact of untamed green spaces on streetscapes, plazas and public space.
He said he hopes to provoke a conversation about the artificial separation between our cities and the broader environment, exploring ways to break down the barriers and promote biodiversity.
“A lot of the planning (for public spaces) is very limited,” Hazelwood said. “There are 110,000 species of plants in Australia and we probably use about 12 in our (public) planting schemes.
“Often it’s for practical reasons because they’re tough and drought tolerant — but it’s not the whole story.”
Hazelwood pointed to the work of UK landscape architect Prof Nigel Dunnett, who has championed wild garden design in urban spaces. He has drawn interest in recent years for his work transforming the brutalist apartment block at the Barbican in London into a meadow-like environment with diverse plantings of grasses and perennials.
Hazelwood said it is this kind of ‘complex nature’ that is required for cities to thrive into the future, but it can be hard to convince planners and developers of the benefits.
“We have been doing a lot of work on how we get complex nature because complexity of species drives biodiversity,” he said.
“But when we try to propose the space the questions are: how are we going to maintain it? Where is the lawn?
“A lot of our work is demonstrating you can get those things and still provide a complex environment.”
At the moment, Hassell together with the University of Melbourne is trialling options at the Hills Showground Metro Station in Sydney, where the remaining ground level planting has been replaced with more than 100 different species of plants and flowers to encourage diversity without the need for regular maintenance. But more needs to be done, Hazelwood said.
“It needs bottom-up change,” he said. ““There is work being done at government level around nature positive cities, but equally there needs to be changes in the range of plants that nurseries grow, and in the way our city landscapes are maintained and managed.”
And there’s no AI option for that.
Consumers are going to gravitate toward applications powered by the buzzy new technology, analyst Michael Wolf predicts
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
