âPeople are desperateâ: Regional renters forced to apply for homes sight unseen
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Real estate agents in regional areas with housing shortages are asking prospective tenants to complete a rental application before letting them attend a property inspection.
Leo Patterson Ross, the chief executive of the Tenants Union, said this practice used to be rare but it had taken off in the past six months across regional NSW, including the Central Coast, Illawarra, Hunter Valley, New England and Riverina.
âBecause the landlord generally has multiple applicants they operate a competitive system to choose,â Mr Patterson Ross said. âThe more people they have, the more rapidly they want to cut down the list - and asking for applications up front is clearly a pretty effective method and has bonuses because it also gets all the info up front.â
“A lot of renters around Australia are in very bad situations,” says Joel Dignam of the advocacy group Better Renting.
“And that’s the combination of the protections expiring, the state of the rental market, particularly in regional areas, and of course, the cuts to income support from the federal government.”
Most states ended their bans on evictions last month – about the same time the government’s jobkeeper wage subsidy and boosted jobseeker payments also came to an end.
Not only can owners apply to have people evicted for rental arrears again, landlords can increase rents once more.
Dignam’s group estimated in November between 5% to 15% of tenants Australia-wide may have been in rental debt, which would equate to 324,000 to 973,000 people.
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Last modified on Thu 29 Apr 2021 08.21 EDT
I began my morning, as I do many mornings, by masochistically searching different apartment listing sites for one-bedrooms and studios I could fantasize about renting –well, to the extent that one can fantasize about something so fundamentally inhumane as giving a landlord money just to have somewhere to live.
There was a gorgeous pre-war apartment in the New York neighborhood of Bed-Stuy, with rich mahogany moldings that took up an entire floor of a brownstone; a corner spot in Williamsburg with windows on two sides of the living room. Too bad everything I found cost upwards of $2,000, a monthly rent that I, a single freelance writer with no partner to speak of much less split rent with, simply cannot afford.
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BRATTLEBORO â You may have seen the Solidarity Friday demonstrations on the Pliny Park corner that began last summer and continued into the fall. In-person actions were paused due to COVID restrictions but we continued meeting (via zoom), learning about our shared concerns and building our coalition. In the ongoing work to gain more participation in and deepen the understanding of our actions, the involved organizations wanted to explain our purpose for Solidarity Fridays in preparation for starting again on May 7.
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