The Melbourne rental market is currently a nightmare

  • Speaking from my experience as a uni student who’s lived in 3 Melbourne rental properties for the past 2 years, it couldn’t be harder to simply find a place to live
  • The cost of renting is far too high and finding an available and affordable rental property takes months of searching

- Source: Department of Families, Fairness and Housing (2024) Here’s a chart of the median rental price per room across the different regions of Melbourne

- Source: Department of Families, Fairness and Housing (2024)
Let’s isolate Inner Melbourne as that’s where it’s most practical for uni students and young people such as myself to live

- Source: Department of Families, Fairness and Housing (2024) Observe how to number of rooms available to rent has fallen drastically in the past few years. The fall in rooms and increase in prices may be another classic case of supply and demand, but regardless of the cause, these costs put a strain on renter’s wallets

- Source: Department of Families, Fairness and Housing (2024)
- Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics (2024)
Looking at the proportional wage growth since 2012 compared to the proportional rent growth. Rent has skyrocketed from post pandemic lows and now overtaken wage growth.

What does this mean?

  • It’s clear that now the Melbourne rental market is becoming more out of touch for people as rental prices increase, availabilities decrease, and rent grows faster than our wages.

  • If unchecked this could have devastating impacts on people trying to break into the market. Furthermore, a lack of affordable and available accommodation for students in the city may isolate young people from attending university in the first place.

Data Sources