Francesca Young began renting on Victoria’s Mornington peninsula as a single mother of three in the early 2000s when properties were “pretty easy to find and reasonably priced”.
But after the 51-year-old’s second marriage ended and she emerged from hospital following a health scare in 2019, she was shocked at the region’s rental prices when she re-entered the market.
“The difference was unbelievable,” she said.
That was before Covid turbocharged everything again, with lockdowns and work from home leading many Victorians to seize the opportunity to move to the coast.
The Mornington peninsula experienced some of the biggest jumps in rent nationwide over the course of the coronavirus pandemic, with some postcodes recording increases of more than a third in two years, according to data provided to the Guardian by CoreLogic.
In fact, seven of the top eight Victorian postcodes for rental jumps between January 2020 and 2022 were on the peninsula. In that time, rents in Blairgowrie grew by 35.4% while Rye and St Andrews Beach increased by 34.9%.
The average rent increase for the 289 Victorian postcodes for which CoreLogic had sufficient rental information was 9.1% for houses. This was the lowest of any state or territory.
Victorian unit rents were relatively flat, with an average increase of just 2.34%. A total of 86 postcodes – all in Melbourne – experienced falls in rent over the past two years.
But on the Mornington peninsula, seven postcodes recorded growth of 20% or more.
Young, who works full-time in administration, rents a three-bedroom house in Rye she shares with another tenant. When her 10-year-old daughter stays with her, they share a single bedroom. But the property – normally an Airbnb – is only a six-month lease until August.
“I’m still looking every day and I’m terrified because I might have to spend up to $500 a week on a single income and that’s without food, bills, running a car and school expenses,” she told Guardian Australia.
“Being a single person, there is nothing half-decent for under $450. That’s nearly half my salary.”
The region’s rental crunch means Young is also competing against potential tenants able to pay 12 months of rent rent up-front to secure a property.
“It feels like I’m up against a brick wall because I don’t have the means to do that and it seems incredibly unfair,” Young said.
Jennifer Beveridge, chief executive of Tenants Victoria, said it was alarming that tenants had to offer up to a year’s worth of rent in advance to secure properties.
“It highlights the demand and that property managers feel it’s OK to ask for that, so what we’re seeing is a real divide between those who can afford to do that and those who can’t,” she said.
“The people who can’t are people who need to stay close to their places of work like retail, healthcare, hospitality. It’s particularly concerning in regional areas where people need to move to another town to find something affordable and that adds huge amounts of travel time.”
Single mother of two Emma Grosse moved back to the Mornington peninsula – where she grew up – from Melbourne in May 2021 to raise her children closer to her family.
The 23-year-old receives single parent welfare payments as her sole income. The only way she could secure her current house – a three-bedroom house for $450 a week – for herself and her two children, aged one and three, was to offer 12 months’ rent up-front with the support of her grandparents.
“I feel really disheartened for the people that are in a position where they’re not able to offer that or they don’t have that support from family members or friends,” she said.
“It’s really heartbreaking to see that the cost of real estate has really torn apart so many families and so many communities.”
CoreLogic’s research director, Tim Lawless, said the rental crunch was likely to remain an ongoing challenge for the Mornington peninsula despite the slowing of the early pandemic’s seachange trend.
“We’ve seen overall across the Mornington peninsula in just the last 12 months, rents are up about 11.2%. What that means is with incomes rising at 2.5%, it’s becoming harder and harder for a lot of people to afford the rents in a market that’s so hotly contested,” he said.
“While I still think demand will remain quite strong along the peninsula, it may be the case that we do see some demand rippling a little further out towards the Bass Coast or towards Frankston.”
CoreLogic only considered postcodes with a minimum of 20 rental observations.
