If you’ve been following along with my blog then you’ll know that one of my favourite topics to rant about is being a renter. I feel a final update for 2024 is required as we add another chapter to our experience as one of the 31% of Australians that don’t own their own home.
Quick recap… We moved into a new rental property in August this year after the landlords at our old place refused to pay (or couldn’t afford) to get the sewage fixed after shit started pumping into the back yard. The house was also on the market for nearly a year and we were having open homes every second weekend which sucked. We were lucky to find another house within our price range just up the street from the old place so promptly moved.
There was a massive ‘For Sale’ sign at the new place but Matt and I assumed (wrongly) that it had just been sold and we would be the first tenants. A month into our tenancy, after asking the real estate agent several times to take down the ‘For Sale’ sign, he let us know that it was in fact still up for sale. Bummer. Although we had a fleeting thought that perhaps we could put an offer on since we were no longer going to be able to build our house anymore and we discovered it had been on the market for over 18 months.
Then, a few weeks ago we woke up to an ‘under contract’ sticker on the MASSIVE for sale sign outside of our house. A week later the real estate agent rang to let us know that an investor had made the offer but not to worry as we wouldn’t have to move in 8 months' time or whenever our 12 month lease was up as they now wanted us to stay. Good news I guess.
So now we have all the appointments that are required when someone sells the house - starting with the building inspector who showed up without warning so wasn’t allowed in. The real estate agent has to give us 24 hours notice for such appointments and they’d "forgotten" to call. It was the building inspector who apologised and rescheduled the appointment - not us or the real estate agent.
The second time round he came in and I immediately liked the guy. He was a no bullshit, get the job done kind of person and we hit it off. I followed him around asking all sorts of questions taking this as my free building inspection considering we were interested in buying the place ourselves.
A great opening question this time of year is are you busy - are people buying houses so close to christmas and he said that it had been pretty quiet up until six weeks ago when he suddenly got a flood of jobs. It turns out that a property investment agency in Queensland was buying up all of the rental properties on the market in Ballarat that were under $500k and had tenants.
Sorry, what was that?
Someone in Queensland is buying this house? Yes. Apparently there was some expo in Queensland recently where Ballarat was flagged as a growing market that was still relatively affordable. The building inspector had done the inspection on the house next door to us that went up for sale a few months ago for the same organisation that is buying our place. The agents in Queensland had been ringing around all the real estate agents in Ballarat flagging any rental properties that were for sale under the $500k mark.
In the last 6 weeks, 30 Ballarat properties had been brought through this agency. THIRTY. Thirty homes just like ours had been added to someone else's ‘portfolio’. I was shocked. How can this be!!! How are any first home buyers ever going to get their foot in the door if ALL of the homes under $500K in my neighbourhood are getting brought out by faceless investors from fucking Queensland?
As someone who has been hugely invested in affordable housing my heart broke - again. How can one of our basic human needs be such a soulless money pit? What is our shameless obsession with hoarding property? Even the building inspector was dark on the prospect. I continued to ask 100 questions as he went through the house making his inspection. Turns out that while our house ‘looked’ nice enough its bones were broken like my heart. The roof needs to be replaced (about $25K), all the rooms needed to be restumpted ($7k per room, about $50K), the bathroom was essentially a sponge and would need to be completely redone and water proofed, all of the insulation in the roof has compressed and needs to be replaced, and oh, your garage doesn’t have a permit.
Wow. So $100K worth of renovations?
Yep. Easily the building inspector said. He also said that if we were buying the house we would then take his report and use it to negotiate with the seller to bring the price down - which was $470K by the way. I know my inner city friends will be scoffing at this price but this is why people move to regional areas - they can afford to.
Finding out this information first hand made me feel slightly less upset about not being able to buy the house. We may have dodged a bullet but this information also isn’t surprising. Our house is an 80 year old weather board home that someone obviously built a clean white box inside of about 10 years ago. Having lived in it for 4 months now we’re more than aware of the problems. What was super upsetting was the fact that despite all the serious defects noted by the building inspector, the investors will still buy this house, just like they bought the neighbouring house that had just as many serious faults.
The building inspector said that he hands these reports back and never hears from the property agents again. The investors buy these houses with NO intention to invest any money into the property but to sit on it for 10 years or so until it's worth selling again. They’ll sit in various levels of disrepair getting progressively worse - as 80 year old weatherboard houses are likely to do, while tenants like myself, will raise our families in their substandard piggy banks.
The landlords will get pissed that we make maintenance requests every month as the house falls apart and we’ll eventually get so sick of the inaction that we'll probably have to move but not into our own house because the same people who are raising our rent and bragging about their great investment are also buying up all the entry level stand-alone homes in our neighbourhood.
As a member of my community, this is a catastrophic problem. Already renters are looked down upon as second class citizens and you’re kidding yourself if you believe otherwise. As someone who has just gone through the rental property application process I had to disclose a huge and unnecessary amount of personal information about myself and my family to a complete stranger in order to gain permission to pay their mortgage.
I’ve heard people casually talk about how they didn't bother to get to know neighbours because they ‘were just renting’ and worst of all, I’ve had a conversation with a landlord who won’t rent out her 2 bedroom house in Central Ballarat because she doesn’t want anyone with a dog to move in! How fucken dare you decide whether my kids can have a pet or not! Sadly this is not an isolated situation, with the 2021 census highlighting one million empty private dwellings.
Secure housing is a human right but it’s seen as a wealth ladder in this country. I did a random google on how to buy investment property and this shitty video shows just how far removed investors are from the people who are actually living in these communities. If you live in one of these neighbourhoods how do you feel about a third of the houses slowly going into disrepair because the people who own them don’t give a shit?
Houses should be a place to live and not something to invest in. What concerns me the most is that of the 227 sitting MPs and senators in Federal Parliament, 12 declared no property ownership (this didn’t include partners properties). The majority of people (77) have more than three properties and several own 5 or more. Who is going to represent the renters? Who is going to stand up and say that we need to put a hold on the increasing price of housing in this country? Why would they when negative gearing is such a sweet arse deal for them?
The Australian housing market is estimated to be over valued by at least 30% and the average Victorian house is 1.8 stars which means that we are fighting over an extremely poor product to begin with. The fact that my neighbourhood is getting brought up by people who have no interest in improving the quality of our homes or the wellbeing of my community is an absolute fucken travesty.
Rant over.
The Grinch has spoken.
Merry Christmas everyone! x
