Everywhere you look in Bright there are trees – shaded crimson, amber and gold in the autumn; they attract thousands of tourists to the Victorian town.
But nestled in between the elms, oaks and maples are “for sale” signs hitched on fences and banged into front yards, revealing others are moving on.
Almost every street has a house for sale in the high country village, population 2,620, where visitors flock each year. Figures from CoreLogic show 71 homes on the market in the last month, more than double that recorded in November 2019.
So what’s causing the mass exodus?
On Friday 100 properties were listed for sale on realestate.com.au. Yet, there were only two for rent.
Cameron Alexander knows this valley below some of the state’s most popular ski fields well – he grew up here and now runs one of its real estate agencies with his brother.
“At the moment, in the Bright area – and we’re talking Bright, Porepunkah and Harrietville – we’re probably seeing around the 200-mark up for sale,” Alexander says.
“That’s including all land as well.”
In June last year Proptrack data showed the median house price in Bright rose 257% over a decade – beaten only by Byron Bay – to reach $1.29m. And in the Australian property market, what goes up often stays up.
But separate data from CoreLogic shows house prices in Bright have fallen by an average 4.5% over the past year – an equivalent of $41,763 – to $892,559.
Alexander says it’s “definitely a buyer’s market”. He says the glut is more significant than usual but there isn’t one single driver to explain it.
People are selling because of interest rates, state government land tax changes and downsizing, Alexander says. Others are Covid-era tree-changers who want their city lives back.
“It’s a real mixed bag,” he says. “There was a lot of uncertainty around interest rates. So a lot of the properties have been sitting on the market between eight and 12 months, and now we’re seeing the spring market come onboard.”
So there are lots to buy – not so many to rent.
“We don’t have any vacant [rental] properties at all,” Alexander says.
Short stays
Alexander is standing on the balcony of a $2.2m home for sale. With polished concrete floors, large entertaining rooms and enough bedrooms for a small army, it has been designed and built for luxury short-term stays.
Bright has about 100 short-term stays available on any given night. Still, it has become so hard to get a rental that the local council is running a campaign to encourage homeowners to put lodgers in their spare rooms.
Eliza Owen, CoreLogic’s head of research, says Bright is “an extreme version” of the rest of Victoria’s “two-speed” market – where prices are falling, and rentals are hard to secure – due to the town’s reliance on tourism.
“Fundamentally, there are a lot of people that need somewhere to live,” Owen says. “But financially, there’s not a lot of people who are able to participate in the purchasing market right now.
“Even if people want to buy housing, it doesn’t mean that they can afford it with high interest rates, high cost of living weighing on savings that you can put towards a deposit and transaction costs.”
Harrison Hein knows all about the pressures of finding housing.
Two years ago, he was living in his swag at the back of a mate’s place in North Fitzroy. He was so fed up with the housing crisis that he specifically started looking for work that offered a paycheck and a roof.
He ended up near Bright, working as an outdoor instructor at a camp, which came with a temporary room.
After 12 months, Hein got a new job as a chef in town. He went into another staff accommodation, where, he says, he was paying $200 a week to live with five other people in a house with no furniture.
But, with a vacancy rate of 1.3%, far below the widely considered 3% for a healthy market, and a median rent of $537, Bright is one of the toughest rental markets in the state. There was nothing else around.
“So I just thought ‘fuck it’,” Hein says. “And I moved into my van.”
For most of the past three months, he has been sleeping on a mattress in the back of his van. There’s nowhere to cook; it’s loud when it rains, hot when it’s sunny, and he has to fill his esky with ice from work to keep anything cold.
“The biggest problem has been I just can’t relax,” he says. “It gets hot and you can’t sit in the van … it’s just a mattress. It’s not even against a wall where you can sit on it, like a couch.
“So I just go do things all day, just to keep busy. Just waiting till I can properly go to sleep.”
Hein says the last time he looked there was one rental available in the whole town – a two-bedroom for $600 a week. In such a tight market, agents say they don’t even advertise listings, instead relying on word of mouth.
In the past week Hein has had some luck. A mate reached out and told him there is a spot available in a property usually listed on Airbnb where he can get some respite from the van.
Michael Harris runs five caravan parks around the area, including Camp Crusty, which has become the “landing base” for workers who fill temporary jobs in agriculture and hospitality around the town.
“With the increasing popularity of tourism in the area, a lot of the traditional rental properties have been converted to short-term stays,” Harris says.
It has always been difficult to get a rental in the area but short-term stays have made it more “crowded”, he says, and there are serious flow-on effects for businesses struggling to get staff.
“If you advertise a job in Bright without accommodation, you might get a handful of applicants,” Harris says. “If you advertise a job in Bright with accommodation, you’ll get 30-plus applicants.
“And often, the first question you will get at a job interview in Bright is not ‘what’s your experience?’ but ‘have you found somewhere to live?’ That’s the first question.
“And if the answer to that is yes, then they’ll ask you about your experience and whether you’re suitable for their business.”
Kellie Gray, owner of Dickens Real Estate, says investors are more interested in the short-term stay market because they can make more money and still use the property when they want.
“We now are seeing a bit of an imbalance where the investors aren’t seeing permanent rentals as a good option,” she says.
There is pressure from the Victorian government, which will expand its vacant residential land tax now targeted at Melbourne properties left uninhabited for six months in a year.
From next month, the tax will apply to nearly all such homes across the state, which the state’s premier, Jacinta Allan, said would encourage property owners “to consider the best use of that property”.
According to Gray: “What the government is trying to do is get rid of those holiday homeowners and turn them into permanent places but all it’s doing is increasing everyone’s expenses.”
She says many people are selling their short-term stay investments because they are exhausted from running a business. Holiday-goers don’t want to lodge “in the fuddy-duddy” stays any more; they want slick hotels comforts in large private homes.
But Gray says most people who are buying properties now are owner-occupiers.
“They’re mostly moving into their own homes.”
