The Australian Landlord Association has proven yet again that its villainy is straight up comical, after members reportedly praised the rental markets’ catastrophic increase in costs as “really exciting”. Ah yes, it’s so exciting that people cannot afford to both rent a home and eat three meals a day!
The webinar, titled “Is it still worth being a landlord?”, discussed rising interest rates and regulations that landlords reckon are making it hard to continue hoarding homes and ransoming the basic right to shelter.
The landlords in the meeting discussed their horror at the concept of rent caps, which some states are considering after reports that landlords are taking advantage of housing insecurity and raising rents by hundreds of dollars a fortnight.
Association committee member Roy Sanderson said discussions of rent caps are “ridiculous”.
“I cannot believe it’s even being talked about by someone who is running our government or is a politician,” he said during the webinar, reports Sydney Morning Herald.
“We can’t cap the cost of gas conversion, smoke detectors. We can’t cap the cost of our interest rate increasing. To suggest that we could cap rental increases to me is a ridiculous conception.”
Imagine comparing the cost of a smoke detector to the cost of rentals. One of these doesn’t eat up 40 to 50 per cent of our salaries, or leave us homeless if we can’t afford it!
@ciara_olo Crazy stuff 😳 #sydney #sydneyrentals
Another committee member, Leah Calnan, said it was “really exciting” to see how much rental prices are increasing in Victoria.
“It’s great to see that there is a pattern with the trending of both units and houses,” she said, per SMH.
She also encouraged fellow landlords to increase rent by $50 or $100 a week, because the competition for housing is so high that losing a tenant (or, in more accurate terms, pushing someone out of the rental market and leaving them vulnerable to homelessness) is a low risk.
“You might lose the tenant, but in this market you will be able to replace the tenant relatively quickly,” she said.
Don’t you just love how we’re dehumanised into completely expendable sources of income rather than real human beings who are desperate for stable living conditions!
Sydney Morning Herald and The Age contacted the Landlord Association’s president Andrew Kent for comment, and he insisted they weren’t celebrating rental increases despite their “excitement”.
“If they were, people would be rushing into the market, not out of the market,” he said.
“I don’t think that anyone is happy with the current state of play.”
@purplepingers #shitrentals #shitrentalsofsydney #shitrentalsofmelbourne #purplepingers #mascot
Kent also claimed landlords aren’t responsible for the state of the rental market, which he blamed on tenants.
“What you’re getting is tenants outbidding each other to try to get the property,” he said.
Ummmm what? I’m pretty sure the Sydney renter whose home went up by $1400 a month because their landlord said it would “bring rent in line with what the current market is achieving” would disagree.
Also, rental bidding is illegal in multiple states. Maybe just set a specific rental price and stick to it, instead of allowing bidding in the first place?
Kent also complained that landlords’ sides of the story aren’t told enough because they’re not as “sad”. Yeah. Exactly, my dude.
Despite all this, the group did come to the agreement that yes, it’s still worth being a landlord. So forgive my lack of sympathy.
