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Sydney’s crazy rental market has returned to the spotlight with shocking images showing hundreds of potential renters lining up on the city’s streets.
Ciara O’Loughlin moved from Dublin to Sydney last week and spent the weekend inspecting 12 properties around Randwick and Coogee in the city’s eastern suburbs.
But when she and her friend arrived for inspections, they were met with massive lines of other applicants stretching around the block.
Ms O’Loughlin said each of the 12 units had “significant” queues of people waiting outside, but added that the apartments were “pretty decent”.
“I would say the longest queue was easily between 100 and 150 people,” he told Daily Mail Australia.
Ciara O’Loughlin filmed a crazy line of prospective tenants waiting outside an apartment inspection in Randwick on Saturday
The young woman said there were up to 150 people waiting to get into a unit in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.
Huge queues of Sydneysiders are seen lining up to inspect a flat in Randwick
“But I didn’t actually wait too long, I’d say the longest wait was 20 minutes as people were literally in and out in two minutes.”
She said that although she and her friend had requested each apartment, they did not feel too safe.
“What I hear is that people are offering more than the asking rent to secure a place, so it’s very competitive,” Ms. O’Loughlin said.
The huge lines of tenants were seen on a TikTok he shared this week, with countless people filmed waiting on the sidewalk in front of various apartment blocks.
More footage showed similar lines seen inside a unit complex, with dozens of applicants waiting aimlessly in the shared hallway.
Another Sydney resident and former estate agent Danny Da Rocha, 29, was listed in Zetland on Saturday and guessed he was one of 70 seeking to inspect the two-bedroom flat.
Mr Da Rocha said the state of the rental market was ‘shocking’ (pictured line outside apartment inspection in Zetland)
Another Sydney resident and former real estate agent, Danny Da Rocha, 29, was listed in Zetland on Saturday and guessed he was one of 70 seeking to inspect the two-bedroom flat.
“The lines were out the door, there were about 30 people when we arrived and then more and more kept coming,” he said, sharing images of the inspection to Tik Tok.
The apartment was priced at $800, but Da Rocha, who now works as a DJ, said he would only be willing to pay about $650.
“It definitely wasn’t worth it, people came in and immediately left,” he said, adding that the current tenants had not cleaned the house before the inspection, and that a set of sand pits would develop behind the block of units.
Having worked in the real estate industry for a year, the 29-year-old said the current state of the rental market was “shocking.”
“I would say the best advice is to know the market very well, get in early and keep applying,” he said.
“Make sure you look at the rooms in all areas because I noticed that in Zetland it’s small rooms that are on sale.”
It comes after housing experts revealed Australia’s rental crisis was so severe that official records show no comparable shortage of available rentals since the Great Depression.
The two-bedroom apartment in Zetland was $800
Mr Da Rocha said there was a sand hole under the unit block that would soon be developed.
House prices in Sydney are expected to rise between 8 and 12 percent this year when interest rate increases halt, with Melbourne forecast to see increases of up to 6 percent and Perth of up to 13 percent.
NSW Tenants Union chief executive Leo Patterson Ross said that while the broader economic circumstances of 90 years ago were very different, the reference to the Great Depression was applicable as rental prices plummeted. they were shooting
“We really have to go back and look at periods like the Great Depression to find comparable situations for renters in Australia right now,” said Patterson Ross.
“Obviously we are not in the Great Depression. But we have to go back that far because we haven’t seen this kind of general pervasive system experience go bad.
“We haven’t seen vacancy rates this low where people are very concerned, very distressed about their chances of being housed in the next few weeks or months.”