Kochie is shocked after Sunrise cohost reveals personal battle

Sunrise host Monique Wright has revealed that she inspected 30 rental properties but failed to secure a home amid Australia’s deepening rental crisis.

Rental vacancy rates have fallen to record lows, with Melbourne now experiencing a tighter rental market than Sydney.

“We looked recently and we looked at 30 properties,” the 49-year-old Wright told her co-hosts David Koch and Natalie Barr, after a segment on rentals.

‘It’s terrible. It’s so horrible,’ the presenter continued with a shock of shock.

‘You see. People are desperate. We’ve been desperate.’

“Right at any price,” Barr agreed.

“Great,” said a visibly shaken Kochie.

Families struggling to find a home, some of whom have been forced to live in tents or sleep in cars, will find no comfort in learning that renting a home in Australia hasn’t been this difficult since the Great Depression.

The country’s rent crisis is so dire that housing experts say official records show no comparable shortage of available leases since the 1930s.

Vacancy rates in Sydney and Melbourne fell to just 1 percent in January, a historic low for both markets.

The only real point of reference for what is happening in the rental market today is the global social catastrophe that followed the Wall Street crash of 1929 – which became the longest, deepest depression of the 20th century.

Landlords in Sydney, Australia’s largest city, have benefited most from an increasingly tight rental market, with migrants and international students returning.

Tenants’ Union of New South Wales chief executive officer Leo Patterson Ross said that while the broader economic conditions of 90 years ago were vastly different, the Great Depression reference applied as rents spiraled upward.

“We really need to go back and look at periods like the Great Depression to find similar situations for tenants in Australia right now,” said Mr Patterson Ross.

Clearly, we are not in the Great Depression. But we have to go back that far, because we haven’t seen this kind of widespread general experience with the system fail.

Shocking footage of dozens of potential tenants showing up for auctions and inspections in some of Sydney’s most desirable suburbs has gone viral.

Queues lined the corner to view properties in Zetland, Coogee and Randwick, with as many as 70 people competing for a number of apartments.

Rising interest rates were passed on to tenants by landlords and prices continue to rise to meet the level of desperation.

Tenants claim they have no power against landlords who raise rents or evict them. Some of those unable to find homes feel physically in danger on top of the normal mental anguish of being under such economic stress.

City dwellers moving to regional areas squeeze an already tight rental market in those regions, displacing local residents.

Homes used for short-term rentals and vacation homes that are vacant for most of the year add to the deficit.

Professor Gurran said it wasn’t just people on low incomes who were struggling.

“Especially in the aftermath of the floods and wildfires, we’ve heard reports of professionals who just can’t get anywhere decent where they live,” she said.

“They have to resort to motel rooms and friends and family and then back to a motel, maybe a pub room for a while.

“It’s affected professionals with permanent jobs, but in terms of sheer numbers, low-income renters are going to be the biggest problem.”

Higher income earners also rented reasonably priced rental properties that were once affordable to lower income earners but were now out of reach for them.

International students returned to Australia after the pandemic and rooms once rented to boarders were converted into work-from-home offices in the cities.

Mr Patterson Ross said it is too easy for tenants to be evicted from their homes by landlords who knew they could get a better price from tenants.

“We already had an imbalance, an unfair rental market built endemic to having an undersupply of really affordable housing,” he said.

“And on top of that, the various changes due to Covid have highlighted and exacerbated many of those issues.”

Mr Patterson Ross said the profile of who hired and for how long had changed in recent years.

“People have been renting for much longer and there is no expectation that they will buy anytime soon,” he said. “The largest group renting in NSW are families with children.”

Mr. Patterson Ross cited a grandmother in a one-bedroom apartment whose daughter and grandson were evicted from their home when the rent was increased by $100 a week.

The daughter and grandson slept on grandmother’s floor until the landlord found out and they had to move again.

“People make many different sacrifices and sometimes it’s families that get together in a two-bedroom unit that sleeps six or seven people,” said Mr. Patterson Ross.

“They move in thinking it’ll only take a week or two to find a place, but then 20, 30 applications later they still haven’t managed to find a house and they’re still jostling.”

Mr Patterson Ross said a ‘major shift’ was needed to treat housing as an essential service – such as food, water, energy and healthcare – rather than as a vehicle for investment.

“In those other industries, you find the delivery, the outcome, the primary focus, and the investment is a means to an end,” he said.

“In residential construction, we are wrong and the financing and investment strategy of residential construction is central and the first consideration.

‘Housing people is seen as a by-product of luck and that is why the last census shows us, for example, one million empty homes.’

Professor Gurran said the problem could be solved, but the current rental system was not fit for purpose and more social housing needed to be built.

Better protections also needed to be provided to provide longer lease terms and protect tenants from unfair price increases and eviction.

New housing projects had to contain land for social and affordable housing and the government had to provide more rent subsidies to the lowest incomes.

Mr Patterson Ross also wanted more low-income social housing to be built by the government.

“We really relied on the private market to build and deliver these things in a relatively lightly regulated way for a long time,” he said.

“We are starting to see some good signs from the federal government and governments across Australia, but not on the scale that will actually address the problem.

“And the longer we wait to address the problem, the harder it gets.”