6 July 2010

Sting finally coming out of rental market?

| johnboy
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The Canberra Times has a muddled story both bemoaning that many workers in Canberra are choosing to live elsewhere than pay the extortionate rates, and at the same time noting that there’s finally capacity in the market:

The boosted first-home owners scheme has helped people vacate rental accommodation, investors have returned to the market and new apartments have come on line, leaving about 1300 properties vacant, more than double the amount of vacant stock in recent years…

Real estate principal Symon Badenoch, who has one of Canberra’s biggest rent rolls, said easing vacancy rates would see the price of rent plateau, not fall. Good quality, well located rental apartments were still attracting strong demand.

”Cold old ex-guvvie three-beddies with electric heating 12 months ago people would rent them no matter what to get into the market. We are now finding those style of properties sitting on the market.”

Renters should bookmark this story for the next time the landlord starts grumbling about putting the price up.

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I rent a freezing 3-bedder in Queanbeyan – one gas fire in the living room which hardly heats the room, never mind the rest of the house. We were lucky to get it, though. Every place we looked at beforehand had queues of 20+ desperate people going through. One house in Curtin was a ramshackle wreck that should have been condemned, not rented, but people were almost knocking each other over to fill in the forms — at $440 a week. A colleague of mine went through this process several times a week for almost a month before he got a unit. S

o, yes, there is a huge shortage of properties, especially in Jan/Feb when the government contracts start. But I’m also very relieved that Sting has outed himself, and from a Canberra closet too!

Hells_Bells7410:55 am 07 Jul 10

All too true cleo, that’s my govt house description to a tee.

I’m not surprised that people don’t want to rent the ex-guvvie’s, as I lived in one, it was bloody freezing, high electricity bills, just an ice box.

madamcholet said :

I hear all the time that there is a rental crisis; however, around where I live, (tuggers way), what I actually find is that properties obviously for rent, seem to be on the market for a period of a few weeks. It always leaves me wondering what the truth is.

Ahhhh it is too easy, I’m not doing it.

arescarti42 said :

That diversity of housing type is probably another reason why Sydney has a public transport system worth talking about.

That’s a bit of a chook/egg problem 🙁

indigoid said :

IMHO we built the wrong kind of suburbs. Not necessarily the wrong kind of housing, but the wrong overall plan. What happened to greenery? The stark lack of it makes a place look like a colony in a desert or on Mars.

I live in a suburb in Sydney dominated (there are whole streets made up of nothing else!) by apartment buildings of height between 4-6 floors, yet the nature strips / footpaths are lined with greenery / trees, and a green space / park is never far away. Sample and fairly representative photo I found on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sg_harrison/3829186769

Contrast this to Macgregor’s new tumour growth… To be fair, any trees they might have planted there haven’t had very long to grow yet, but when I last looked they didn’t seem to have actually planted any at all. Has that changed? Even if they have planted trees there, it’ll be 15+ years before the results start to be worthwhile.

Sydney certainly has cancers like New Macgregor as well, of course. I just don’t live in one (hurrah!), and I thought I’d mention my area as an example of how higher-density housing can coexist with a healthy dose of greenery.

I must agree with you on that. There seem to be a lot of people in this city who are vehemently opposed to anything over 2 stories within suburbs, and highly suspicious of anything over 1 story.

I don’t understand it, good planning and greenery make aesthetically pleasing suburbs, not swaths characterless single story houses.

That diversity of housing type is probably another reason why Sydney has a public transport system worth talking about.

In my area the longest I have seen an apartment in my area last is about 3 days, and that’s with ridiculous rents. Although it is in walking distance of Civic.

Re properties sitting on the market.

i recall we had about 50 lots of people go through our place. About 25 applications filled out two who were accepted then pulled out and the the one that was deemed suitable and signed and paid.

all up about 6 weeks but we have the tenant we want, under the terms we asked for and at the rent we we set.

IMHO we built the wrong kind of suburbs. Not necessarily the wrong kind of housing, but the wrong overall plan. What happened to greenery? The stark lack of it makes a place look like a colony in a desert or on Mars.

I live in a suburb in Sydney dominated (there are whole streets made up of nothing else!) by apartment buildings of height between 4-6 floors, yet the nature strips / footpaths are lined with greenery / trees, and a green space / park is never far away. Sample and fairly representative photo I found on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sg_harrison/3829186769

Contrast this to Macgregor’s new tumour growth… To be fair, any trees they might have planted there haven’t had very long to grow yet, but when I last looked they didn’t seem to have actually planted any at all. Has that changed? Even if they have planted trees there, it’ll be 15+ years before the results start to be worthwhile.

Sydney certainly has cancers like New Macgregor as well, of course. I just don’t live in one (hurrah!), and I thought I’d mention my area as an example of how higher-density housing can coexist with a healthy dose of greenery.

I hear all the time that there is a rental crisis; however, around where I live, (tuggers way), what I actually find is that properties obviously for rent, seem to be on the market for a period of a few weeks. It always leaves me wondering what the truth is.

I worked for a very brief period of time in a well known yellow and red coloured RE agents in Tuggers when we first arrived in Canberra, and I know for a fact that the rentals section would get loads and loads of enquiries and then sit on them for ages pretending to deliberate over who was the most appropriate tenant. There were desperate people calling all the time to find out if they had been successful or not along with buyers of investment properties wanting to know if there new property that was starting to cost them money had been allocated to someone. I recall one instance that took 6 weeks to put a tenant in – and not for want of credible applications.

Coincidentally, it’s the same RE office that has put inappropriate tenants in next door to us.

I’m also glad to hear that Sting has finally decided to buy.

Thoroughly Smashed12:07 pm 06 Jul 10

peterepete said :

I always wondered when Sting was going to come out

But who ever imagined he’d use the rental market to do so?

stereo henry12:03 pm 06 Jul 10

@DeadlySchnauzer or perhaps the greatest price-fixing racket, ever?

I always wondered when Sting was going to come out

DeadlySchnauzer10:51 am 06 Jul 10

With the number of massive apartments that have gone up around Canberra in the last few years (Kingston, Acton, Woden etc) plus big land releases (Forde, Bonner, Macgregor etc) i am amazed that rental rates and house prices continue to be so high here.

Did we build the wrong type of housing? Or has our population growth actually outstripped all this new housing stock?

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