No room to move: Agents have an undersupply of rental stock when compared to the number of people desperate for a home.
Photo by
Murray Silby
A real estate agent in Shepparton says would-be renters are getting so desperate that some are becoming aggressive when they miss out on a property.
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Shepparton Real Estate’s rental catalogue is running at 100 per cent filled, meaning if a property becomes available for rent, dozens of people are vying for that single house, townhouse or unit.
“Within 24 hours of the property going up online, we'll have applications coming through,” senior property manager Bek O’Toole said.
“And we'll usually have between 10 and 15 on the first day, and it'll just increase from there. We'd have at least 100 by the time we're finished, and we've leased the property.”
Ms O’Toole said all rental agents in Shepparton were experiencing similar circumstances, with the competition for accommodation emphasised during property inspections.
“We're still having about an average of 30 attend. We were having an average of 50 between January and April,” she said.
Ms O’Toole said many of the applicants applying for rentals were good prospects, but only one could be chosen, leaving agents with the difficult task of informing all the disappointed people who were unsuccessful.
“Let's say 50 per cent of them are good prospects, well, they've (the landlord) got more than enough to pick from and they might just pick the first one that comes across their radar,” she said.
“It's emotionally draining because you can't help them (the applicants). There's just nothing you can do. There's one house, you know, we don't get to pick who goes in it. We just do reference checking, the landlord picks who they want and everyone else misses out.”
Ms O’Toole’s colleague, Kim Smith, said the despair among unsuccessful applicants was starting to show.
“That's probably been seen a lot more over the last eight weeks,” she said.
“That the disappointed ones have gone for anywhere between 10 and 20 homes and they're missing out and then they're getting angry with us because they can't actually be provided with a home, and it's not because we don't want them or they may not be suitable or their income not enough.”
The agents said the lack of rental stock had also led to as many as half of all applicants applying to rent properties that were more than they could afford.
Ms Smith said there was a shortage of rental stock before the pandemic, but the arrival of COVID-19 had heightened the problem.
“We've had a lot of people coming from out of town, moving from Melbourne to Shepparton because of that, and the influx of people coming for jobs here has been huge,” she said.
Supply shortage: Shepparton Real Estate senior property managers Bek O'Toole and Kim Smith.
Photo by
Murray Silby
The agents said changes to the Residential Tenancies Act brought in by the Victorian Government in 2021 that tightened the way landlords could manage their properties had been another factor leading to a reduction in the amount of rental stock.
They said rather than operate under those changes, many landlords had chosen to sell in a hot market.
“Our occupancy rate is down to zero per cent. We've got nothing vacant. So that's hard because we’ve still got these hundreds of people still looking for homes and we've got nothing to offer them,” Ms Smith said.
“So that's probably what we're facing over the last few or even last eight weeks is that tenants are getting extremely angry, which we understand, but as the specs are saying, we’ve got one property and only one person can go in there.”
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