Veronica Silva is being turfed out of the home she has rented for a decade.
"It's just too hard. I'm crying myself to sleep most nights … it's just stress," the great-grandmother says.
A hotel housekeeper for 40 years, Ms Silva says six of her neighbours are also being kicked out of their Gold Coast homes amid the expiry of a scheme giving landlords a subsidy for providing affordable rental housing.
"I'm going to miss all these people that are around me," she laments.
"They all have at one stage or another touched my life and made it better. And I've got to go and do that again. At 78 … I can't.
On the surface, Australia's rental crisis does not make sense.
More than 500,000 people left the country during the pandemic, and closed national borders prevented immigration and tourism. That should have freed up housing and pushed down rents across the nation.
But after brewing for decades, the rental crisis is truly here.
Record low vacancies, rents surging
Ms Silva is at the sharpest end of a growing calamity.
The rate of vacant rental properties is at record lows. The proportion of homes considered affordable for pensioners like Ms Silva is even smaller.
Having secured a property, Ms Silva, who uses a motorised wheelchair, will now live 60 kilometres further away from her family and pay $70 a week more from her fixed income.
Asked what she will cut out of her budget to make that work, the answer is blunt: "Food."
Property firm REA Group uses its popular realestate.com.au website to mine information about the rental market.
Its quarterly PropTrack Rental Report has found weekly rental prices have shot up, rising 4.7 per cent over the year to March, the strongest annual rate of rental growth recorded since before 2015.
That is because of a lack of stock. The total number of properties available for rent in March 2022 was the lowest since August 2003, falling 4 per cent in March 2022 to be 24 per cent lower than a year earlier.
In March there were fewer than 130,000 total rental listings available. That is a huge 24.9 per cent lower than the decade average, which was about 170,000.
There are simply fewer homes for people to try to rent.
"Basically, since 2014, when banks started to be allowed to charge higher interest rates to investors, we've seen a lot of investors leaving the market," said Cameron Kusher, executive manager of economic research and author of the report.
With international borders reopened and migrants returning to our shores, Mr Kusher anticipates a further tightening in the rental market, with rents to rise the most in Sydney and Melbourne.
The capitals are the largest rental markets in Australia and the ones that had seen a brief drop in rents earlier in the pandemic, largely centred in a few central areas of those cities.
"The lack of supply has been exacerbated by many former landlords selling their investment properties," Mr Kusher explains.
"With most of this stock having been purchased by owner-occupiers, it has reduced the overall supply of stock in the rental market."
Using its own Realestate.com.au data, PropTrack estimates that around 20 per cent of current transactions involve a landlord selling their property, while only around 8 per cent are bought by new investors on the other side of the transaction.
That means about 12 per cent of properties being sold at the moment are moving from the rental stock to being owner-occupied. PropTrack said that would be roughly 50,000 a year if that trend is maintained.
"Of course, those shifts reduce rental demand," says PropTrack economist Paul Ryan, "but it tends to be wealthier renters who are able to move into ownership."
That would mean wealthier households buying homes formerly rented by people on lower incomes.
Second homes on the rise
But, while first home buyer numbers did rise, property purchases by people who want to live in the home — termed owner-occupiers — have not taken much pressure off the rental market. Mr Kusher offers several reasons why.
"A lot of people sold their investment properties because they wanted to upgrade their owner-occupied property into something bigger, nicer and in a better location," he says.
That also led to purchases of "second homes" in coastal and regional areas, as people cooped up in the city looked for boltholes.
Additionally, lockdowns gave people who would normally spend big on discretionary items, such as restaurants, overseas travel and expensive clothing, enforced savings that allowed them to buy holiday houses.
With borders shut, many landlords took properties off short-stay accommodation websites and rented them long term. As borders open, some areas are seeing a surge of rental properties converting back to short-stay accommodation.
"But the other big factor was rental demand moved from where it was usually very strong — inner-city areas of Sydney and Melbourne, our capital city areas – to a lot of these regional markets," he says.
Although there was a much-noted surge in people moving to regional and coastal areas, a big factor in the housing squeeze was that greater numbers of people stayed.
Work-from-home mandates and an explosion in online services meant people who would normally leave the country for the city — to work and study — stayed put.
As locked-down city residents moved in, rents in the country shot up.
"A whole lot of people from the city have moved to regional areas. They can work from home. They enjoy the lifestyle of a regional area and they've really pushed up the price of rents and house prices," says Kate Colvin, spokesperson for Everybody's Home, which campaigns for more affordable housing.
'Fever pitch'
Anglicare Australia's annual Rental Affordability Snapshot report examined 45,992 rental listings and looked for ones costing less than a third of people's income. Any higher and a person is considered to be in "housing stress".
Just 2 per cent were affordable for a person earning a full-time minimum wage. That's 720 rental properties across the whole nation.
Less than 1 per cent (312 properties) would be affordable for someone on the age pension and only 51 rentals were affordable for a person on the disability support pension.
Launching the report, Anglicare Australia executive director Kasy Chambers says rents are rocketing in cities, towns and regional areas.
"We keep hearing that this election is about living costs, but housing is the biggest cost facing Australians," she argues.
"People on low incomes don't stand a chance.
Others in the field underline the urgency.
Cassandra Goldie, chief executive of the Australian Council of Social Service, calls the situation a "crushing pincer movement of rising rents and stagnant incomes" for people on low incomes.
Functionally, the vacancy rate in the private rental market is zero, which National Shelter chief executive Emma Greenhalgh calls a "national housing emergency".
Not enough supply
Lamenting the situation, chief executive of the Property Council of Australia, Ken Morrison describes a simple economic mantra: supply and demand.
"We actually didn't have a supply of housing including rental product that we needed coming into the pandemic," he argues.
A seven-month parliamentary inquiry recently looked at how to improve housing supply and affordability across the country.
Chair Jason Falinksi, a Liberal Party MP, says the report was filled with practical ways to "cut the Gordian knot of oppressive regulation, muddle-headed central planning, officious big state regulation and the skinning of new home buyers via a myriad of taxes and charges designed to raise funds not living standards".
Other members of the committee rubbished the report on its release for having "a pre-conceived view" about the problems and solutions, and for not involving state governments despite their key role in planning and development decisions.
Unaffordable housing
There are many factors that have fuelled the lack of affordable housing.
The issues cross jurisdictions between federal, state and local governments and can pit the economic interests of property investors, people with mortgages and those renting against each other.
There are also complex interactions.
Record-low interest rates have allowed people to borrow more money, fuelling higher house prices. At the same time, they've contributed to low interest rates on savings, prompting some people to enter the housing market as investors, generating rental properties.
No one level of government can fix all the issues. But ignoring the problem won't help either, according to Ms Colvin.
"It's the critical issue that underpins our lives," she says.
"We all live in a home.
Veronica is not alone
Veronica Silva says six of her neighbours are being evicted because the National Rental Affordability Scheme (NRAS) no longer applies to their homes. That's just on her street. In the suburb, the number is much higher.
Willow Vale, home to Ms Silva for the past decade, will lose 22 homes supported by the scheme this year. Four more expire next year.
The scheme started in 2008 and was designed to increase the supply of new and affordable rental dwellings by providing an annual payment — for up to 10 years — that bridged the gap between what people could afford and what the property could get on the open market.
Landlords are paid to make available affordable rentals, at least 20 per cent below market rates. But for many, the decade of support is up.
Data from the National Affordable Housing Providers Association (the peak body of NRAS providers) shows the nation will lose 22,160 NRAS properties in the next two years, 8,038 of them in Queensland.
For Ms Silva it means moving much further from her family, including 16 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.
"I can't describe how I feel. It's devastating. It's depressing," she says.
