Changes in the Australian Rental Market

Over the past three years, the rental markets in Brisbane and the Gold Coast have experienced dramatic ups and downs. As the pandemic worsened through 2020 and the first half of 2021, global travel restrictions dealt a heavy blow to the short-term rental markets in Brisbane and the Gold Coast, with business travellers and tourists all but disappearing. This pushed a large number of short-term rental properties into the long-term rental market, where demand was also falling — for instance, international students, a key source of long-term tenants, were unable to arrive, while people who had lost their jobs due to the pandemic chose to share housing with friends or family to cut their rental costs. As a result, supply and demand in the long-term rental market became imbalanced, with CBD apartment rents in particular falling to varying degrees.

However, in the second half of 2021 the situation reversed. With borders reopening, business travellers and tourists gradually returned, and short-term rental properties that had been temporarily switched to long-term leases moved back to the short-term market as their leases allowed, at one point creating a severe shortage of available properties. The return of international students likewise led to a shortage in the long-term rental market. With demand outstripping supply, long-term rents rose to varying degrees, generally by 10%–30%. New development projects in the Brisbane and Gold Coast property markets are currently very limited, yet migration demand is rising rapidly, particularly the number of migrants from China.