I’ve visited some shocking rental properties in my time.
Luckily the couple of places my wife and I rented before buying were decent, but some of my friends haven’t been so lucky. There was one place where you had to take a broomstick into the toilet with you because the door didn’t have a handle or lock, so you’d have to push the broomstick against the bottom of the door to prevent someone from busting in on you while you were doing your business.
Not great.
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Then there was the place with the electric cooktop that didn’t work so in order to cook you had to sit a portable electric cooktop on top of the existing one so you had warm food. Not great.
Plenty of people are prepared to pay less for a home with, well, let’s just call them quirks.
In another place you had to cash up a card of some sort and put that in a machine on the wall so you had lights and power, and if your card ran out of credit the electricity just turned off. Not great. You could be watching The Sixth Sense and be almost at the climactic part where you find out Bruce Willis’s character has been a ghost the whole movie but he didn’t know it and all of a sudden, darkness. Silence.
Sorry, spoiler alert. Actually, I think you’re meant to say spoiler alert before you ruin something. My bad. That’s on me. Also, I’m sort of not sorry. That movie came out in 1999. If you haven’t seen it by now, that’s sort of your fault. But yeah, if you haven’t seen it, you should. It’s a great film with a surprise twist you never see coming. Now back to my story …
I had another friend who had a plumbing situation where to get hot water in the shower you had to first turn on the cold tap in the laundry and leave it going flat chat for the duration of the wash. Not great.
And another friend had a place where all the cupboard doors were missing because a previous tenant had removed them to feed the home’s open fireplace through a particularly bleak winter. Again, not great.
Yeah, I’m not sure houses are meant to do that. But hey, if the price is right …
All of these places had one thing in common – they were cheap. Dirt cheap in fact. They were perfectly liveable when you worked within their quirks and restrictions, but they were cheap. And they were perfect for their purpose, which was to house uni students who had bugger all money to spend on rent. They were a great first start and played a pivotal role for generations of people in gaining independence and forming a sense of identity. From that point of view they were an important part of the housing supply.
But these homes, these super cheap dwellings, are disappearing. I had a story in The Advertiser yesterday about the ever-rising median prices in a lot of our suburbs. And the thing with this is, in most cases it’s not greedy landlords jacking up prices.
A common sight on our suburban streets as older homes make way for new ones.
It’s that where a suburb might have had a decent number of older, cheaper homes, now they’re packed with brand new builds that command a premium price, even in affordable suburbs. Older homes on spacious allotments that get replaced with two or more as property owners cash out at a market high and developers cash in on a housing crisis, knowing whatever they put in, if priced correctly, will be snapped up the second the artist’s impressions hit realestate.com.au.
While this is all great on paper, from a rental perspective it raises one serious question – where will all the super affordable housing be?
Expect to see less of this and more townhouses in the future as developers cash in with infill developments and subdivisions.
There’s a minimum cost to build new, and it’s not cheap, so you know damn well the landlords will be recouping this back in rent, which is what we’ve already seen in the what – used – to – be – affordable northern suburbs. So, if it’s all being bulldozed, where will all the genuine entry-level properties be?
Sure, compared to a pair of white townhouses they may not be as visually appealing, but this bottom-tier housing is a vital part of the mix. And something we will all miss when it’s gone and our kids are living with us and their children long after they should have packed their bags and forged their own future.
English (US) · 