When I go to a rental inspection in Melbourne, I’m rarely alone. Whether it’s in the CBD, Burwood or Box Hill South, there are usually ten or more other people walking through the same flat, and most of them look far more established than I do: steady incomes, rental histories, references. I’m a student. I can usually guess who the agent will call back.
Back home in Hyderabad, finding a place to live isn’t this hard. There is housing at almost every price point, so a tighter budget gets you a different kind of place, not no place at all.
Online, the explanation for why Melbourne is different is nearly always the same: immigration. Under almost any housing story on social media, migrants get the blame. As a migrant myself, I think that explanation is too simple, and it’s starting to feed something uglier than a policy debate. My own view is that the bigger problem lies in government policy: what gets built, and whether anyone is encouraging the cheaper housing people like me can afford.
But an opinion isn’t evidence. So this report puts both explanations against official data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Homes Victoria. Hover over the charts for exact figures, and use the buttons and menus to explore. I’ve tried to show what the data says, including any parts that don’t suit my argument.
If migration is what drives rents, the clearest test happened in 2020. When Australia closed its international border, more people left the country than arrived, and net overseas migration to Victoria went negative. If the blame online is right, rents should have dropped while the border was shut and climbed again once it reopened.
Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics (2026a, 2026b, 2026c). Migration is quarterly; rent change is the CPI rents component for Melbourne.
Overseas migration is only one way a state grows. People are also born here and move from interstate. This chart splits each year’s growth into those three parts and lines it up against how many new homes were approved for them. The bottom panel shows how many new residents arrived for every home approved.
Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics (2026a, 2026b). Approvals are a leading indicator; not every approved dwelling is built.
If policy is the problem, it should show up in what gets built: whether new supply includes the apartments, units and townhouses that tend to be cheaper, and how much housing the government builds itself. Use the buttons to switch between the number of homes and each type’s share.
Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics (2026b).
These are the areas where I’ve been to inspections. Homes Victoria publishes rents for groups of suburbs, so Burwood appears as Burwood–Ashburton, and I’ve used Box Hill as the nearest published area to Box Hill South. The rents shown are for new leases, which is what anyone searching right now actually pays. Use the dropdown to pick the kind of place you’d be looking for, and hover to see how many new leases were signed.
Source: Homes Victoria (2026a), based on Residential Tenancies Bond Authority bond lodgements.
This is where the migration argument has its strongest evidence, and it’s only fair to say so. When the border closed, the median rent for a new lease in the CBD–St Kilda Rd area fell from $540 a week in March 2020 to $355 by the end of 2021, a drop of about a third. In Box Hill and Burwood–Ashburton, rents dipped far less (by $65 and $27 a week). When the border reopened, CBD rents rebounded fastest and are now $660 a week.
So migration clearly moves rents, especially in the inner city. At their lowest, CBD rents were back below 2010 levels. That sounds like relief, but a lower rent isn’t necessarily an affordable one. The next chart asks the more important question: when rents fell, did homes actually become affordable for people on low incomes?
Homes Victoria tracks how many newly leased homes would be affordable for a household on a Centrelink income, meaning rent of no more than 30% of their income. That’s close to a student budget. The chart compares the City of Melbourne and Whitehorse, the two councils where I’ve been inspecting, with Metropolitan Melbourne and Regional Victoria as a whole. Use the dropdown to change the size of home, and click the legend to hide or show a line.
Source: Homes Victoria (2026b).
Even during the border closure, when CBD rents dropped by a third, at most 2% of new leases in the City of Melbourne were affordable for someone on a Centrelink income. That 2% was the highest figure since 2010, and it has since fallen back to about 1.5%. In Whitehorse, it has never risen above about 3%. In September 2025, only 78 newly leased homes across the whole City of Melbourne, and 22 in Whitehorse, were affordable on that income.
Across Metropolitan Melbourne the figure has stayed between about 5% and 11% of new leases for fifteen years, through migration booms and the border closure alike. The biggest change is in regional Victoria, where the affordable share of new leases fell from about 62% in 2010 to about 26% in early 2023. The steepest part of that fall came from 2020, while overseas migration was negative, so something other than migration was squeezing regional rentals.
For someone on a low income, a fall in migration made inner-city rents cheaper, but it didn’t make them affordable. The shortage of low-cost homes was there before the migration surge, and it stayed there while migration was negative.
The data doesn’t let anyone off the hook, including me. Migration does push rents up: when it stopped, inner-city rents for new leases fell by a third, and they rose again when it came back.
But the story online stops there, and the data doesn’t. Even when migration was negative, almost nothing in the city was affordable on a low income, and across Melbourne the affordable share of new leases barely moved in fifteen years. Meanwhile, the number of homes approved in Victoria fell by a quarter just as the population started growing again, and very little of what does get approved is public or low-cost housing.
Blaming newcomers is easy because migrants are visible: we’re the ones standing next to you at the inspection. A shortage of homes that never got built is much harder to see. If the aim is to make renting affordable, the data points less at who is arriving and more at what we are, and aren’t, building for them.
I used Claude (Anthropic) as a support tool while completing this assignment. It helped me refine my writing, check spelling and grammar, find relevant references and online sources, and understand the technical aspects of the tools I used. The choice of topic was my own. I reviewed every suggestion critically before deciding whether to include it, and I take responsibility for all analytical decisions, data interpretation, and the final code, which I have checked and verified myself Anthropic. (2026). Claude (Opus 4.8) [Large language model]. https://claude.ai
R Core Team. (2025). R: A language and environment for statistical computing [Computer software]. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org/
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2026a). National, state and territory population [Data set]. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/national-state-and-territory-population/latest-release
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2026b). Building approvals, Australia [Data set]. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/industry/building-and-construction/building-approvals-australia/latest-release
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2026c). Consumer price index, Australia [Data set]. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-inflation/consumer-price-index-australia/latest-release
Cowgill, M., Meers, Z., Lee, J., & Diviny, D. (2026). readabs: Download and tidy time series data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (Version 0.4.20) [R package]. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=readabs
Homes Victoria. (2026a). Rental report – quarterly: Moving annual rents by suburb [Data set]. DataVic. https://discover.data.vic.gov.au/dataset/rental-report-quarterly-moving-annual-rents-by-suburb
Homes Victoria. (2026b). Rental report – quarterly: Affordable lettings by LGA [Data set]. DataVic. https://discover.data.vic.gov.au/dataset/rental-report-quarterly-affordable-lettings-by-lga
Sievert, C. (2020). Interactive web-based data visualization with R, plotly, and shiny. CRC Press. https://plotly-r.com
Wickham, H., Averick, M., Bryan, J., Chang, W., McGowan, L. D., François, R., Grolemund, G., Hayes, A., Henry, L., Hester, J., Kuhn, M., Pedersen, T. L., Miller, E., Bache, S. M., Müller, K., Ooms, J., Robinson, D., Seidel, D. P., Spinu, V., … Yutani, H. (2019). Welcome to the tidyverse. Journal of Open Source Software, 4(43), 1686. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01686