The Sydney rental market is always an absolute shitshow but a slew of frustrated TikToks by tenants looking for a home really shows just how dire things are right now.
If you live in Sydney and are on TikTok as much as I am, chances are you’ve noticed an influx of videos on your feed of painfully long lines for absurdly overpriced properties.
One user shared a video of a line of prospective tenants for a rental inspection which wound all the way out of the building and down a street. Just when you think the line ends, it keeps going?!
@ciara_olo Crazy stuff 😳 #sydney #sydneyrentals
Others have shared similar videos of their competition, with one TikTok user revealing the home they were inspecting was so packed with prospective renters they could barely move around it.
@cacaobeann I can’t even walk around the houses properly 😭 #sydney #propertymarket ♬ DiCaprio Hit a Baby – Bad Mechanics
Another TikToker shared footage of a two bedroom apartment in Zetland which was going for a whopping $800 a WEEK. Despite the real estate agent arriving 30 minutes late for the inspection, the line to view the apartment was still made up of dozens of people. The TikToker estimated there were around 60 people just in the line for the elevator.
https://www.tiktok.com/@djdaroc/video/7185717627506003201
The apartment itself was a mess, covered in boxes and other random stuff that people had to avoid stepping on while viewing the small place. Which says a lot about how out of control the rental market is: a home can be a fkn mess because it won’t hurt its chances of being leased at all.
Honestly, an apartment with that cost and all that competition… I would just turn the fuck around.
All this rental drama comes off the back of a report which revealed rental vacancies across the country are at a record low of 0.8%.
Domain chief of research and economics Dr Nicola Powell referred to the current situation as “a landlord’s market” and called available rentals “a drop in the ocean compared to what we need”, per SMH.
Chief executive officer of the Tenants’ Union of New South Wales Leo Patterson Ross compared the rental prices spiral to the Great Depression.
“We really have to go back and look at periods like the Great Depression to find comparable situations for renters in Australia at the moment,” he said, per the Daily Mail.
“Obviously we’re not in the Great Depression. But we we have to go back that far because we haven’t seen this kind of widespread general experience of the system going wrong.
“We haven’t seen such low vacancy rates where people are very worried, very distressed about their chances of being housed in the coming weeks or months.”
It’s fkn brutal out here.
