In July last year, Anna’s* real estate agent called to say that her landlord had decided to sell the house in Bega, in the state’s south, where she and her partner had lived for the past two years.
The deadline to move out – a few months later in September – came well before her lease was due to expire, but under New South Wales’ “no grounds” eviction rules she and her partner had no choice but to move out.
But when the time came to hand in the keys, Anna was told the landlord had changed his mind.
“They said ‘the owner doesn’t want to sell [now]. He wants to give it to someone else to rent’,” she told the Guardian.
“I said, ‘well, couldn’t we have had longer?’ They didn’t really answer. They just took the keys.”
In the past two years, regional NSW has borne the brunt of triple-digit rent increases as waves of tree-changers spurred into the regions during the pandemic combine with long-running housing supply shortages.
Data compiled by CoreLogic shows that nine of the top 10 rent increases since January 2020 in NSW came in postcodes outside of greater Sydney, while the city’s fringe also experienced significant price jumps.
The steepest rent rises came in the state’s south, including the districts surrounding the border town of Albury, where rents jumped from between 30.5% and 42.3% in some areas.
Coming off a low base, it’s seen rents rise by more than $100 in many suburbs.
It has prompted reports within the sector of an increase in what’s known as “no grounds” evictions, meaning landlords are not required to provide any reason for terminating a lease.
Leo Patterson Ross, the chief executive of the Tenants’ Union of NSW, said he had seen a massive increase in the number of evictions like Anna’s during the pandemic, due to what he called the “waves of displacement” caused by rising rents in regional parts of the state.
“We saw a doubling of people calling about no grounds evictions in the regional areas because people are being pushed out to make way for the flow of people moving out of the cities,” he said.
“We know rent rises fastest when tenancies turn over, so if someone is evicted without grounds there’s a double whammy because the person knows there’s very little alternative stock.
“They end up either paying more, or they inadvertently push up the cost somewhere else by moving even further out to find something affordable.”
That’s borne out by rental prices in areas in Sydney’s fringe.
In the well-heeled southern highlands retreat of Bowral, rents rose by 33.6% in the past two years as Sydneysiders flocked for a change of scenery. It had a flow-on effect in neighbouring towns such as Moss Vale, which saw an increase of 29.3%. In both towns the median rent grew between $167 and $218 for a house.
On the state’s Central Coast, north of Sydney, rents have also boomed. In Terrigal, rent jumped by almost 30% to a median of $837 a week, up from $645, at the same time as nearby suburbs saw similar rises.
That can have significant impacts on pre-existing residents. Last year, the advocacy group Shelter NSW released a report conducted by the Regional Australia Institute seeking to calculate housing needs across regional parts of the state.
By comparing factors such as rental and mortgage stress, social-housing availability, and the proportion of single-family households, it calculated the regions with the highest housing need. It found the Central Coast at the top of the list.
While the report found the region was characterised by a “growing population with a high average income”, that was contrasted by the number of families experiencing some form or rental or mortgage stress.
“This indicates that while average incomes are relatively high, so too is the cost of housing and that this is creating housing pressures for lower-income households,” the report found.
Cathy Callaghan, a senior policy officer from Shelter NSW, said the report showed that rent prices alone were not the only indicator of issues with housing cost.
“It’s about looking under the averages,” she said.
“I think one of the things to look at with rental stress is not just about how much rent is but, when people’s income have been very flat, and the casualisation of the workforce has become so prevalent, there’s a lot of people out there who are just piecing a living together and barely getting by.”
After they lost their Bega property, Anna and her partner were unable to find a new home for months, and lived in a tent for two months as they searched for somewhere to live. In the end, they were forced to head further south, to Pambula, to find a property.
“It made me feel like a bad person, like, I don’t know, we paid rent on time all the time, we did everything right, it was a run-down old house, we did it up when we moved in, it just, disappointed me – kind of like I did the wrong thing.”
*Not her real name
CoreLogic only considered postcodes with a minimum of 20 rental observations.
