Young mum reveals why she moved her family 1,800km from the Gold Coast to a new town amid Australia’s rental crisis

A young mother-of-two has revealed why she packed up her family and moved more than 600 miles away during Australia’s rental crisis.

Nicola Varlamos28, lived on the Gold Coast for four years before her family moved to Ocean Grove, a popular surfing town on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula.

The couple decided to move south after searching for a larger home on the Gold Coast for a month with little success.

Ms Varlamos said she had been “shocked” by the huge demand for rental properties in the four years she had lived there.

“There was so much demand for it and I couldn’t really find anything that I thought was worth what people were asking for,” she told Daily Mail Australia.

“At the same time, all the information and statistics were coming out about the rental situation and particularly the Gold Coast, which is one of the most expensive places to live in Australia, because supply just couldn’t keep up, so people were charging crazy amounts.”

Ms Varmalos is pictured with her four-year-old daughter and her fiancé

Ms Varlamos, who is originally from Melbourne, decided to look elsewhere and found a three-bedroom house 1,800 kilometers away in Ocean Grove for $600 a week.

She estimated a similar property on the Gold Coast would cost about $1,000, even if the house was a 30-minute drive from the beach.

The mother-of-two said while her family could have afforded to stay in Queensland, they wanted to get their money’s worth, adding she had friends in their mid-30s who hated having to spend a having to pay a ‘large part’ of their income to their parents. rent.

“I felt like if we paid all our money on rent, it would set us back so many years. “We’re expecting a second baby and I thought, ‘We can afford those prices, but we also want to buy our own property,’” she said.

“It felt disturbing and unethical to pay such a high amount for very average places, when you can’t get a garden and a large multi-bedroom house for less than a thousand dollars in the areas we were interested in.”

The mother of two says she doesn’t feel like she’s a victim of the rental crisis

Ms Varmalos now pays half as much rent in Victoria as she does on the Gold Coast

Before Ms Varlamos became pregnant with her second child, the family lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the Gold Coast for $550 a week.

‘So for an extra $50 a week we have three bedrooms, an office, a huge garden and an entertainment room. We have a good home that we can grow into,’ she said.

‘It’s a huge difference. You feel much calmer.

‘You’re going to pay rent every week. You don’t want to hold a grudge against your landlord or resent having to pay so much money for a house.

“I don’t want to be in that mentality when I’m paying rent; you have to feel like you’re getting value for your money.’

The mother of two says she doesn’t feel like she’s a victim of the rental crisis.

“We’ve only lived in one place as a family and that was the Gold Coast,” she said.

‘And we are young, this is the time to experiment and see if you like living somewhere else; you don’t have to stay forever.’