Perth vacancies tighten for fifth month in a row: SQM Research

The availability of rental accommodation in Australia’s capital cities remains “excessively tight”, with Perth and Hobart leading the decline in available rentals in October, according to SQM Research. 

The vacancy rate in Perth fell by 0.2 percentage points in October from 0.9% to 0.7%, with the number of rentals falling from 1,436 to 1,119.

This was the fifth successive month that the vacancy rate has fallen in Perth.

SQM Research director Louis Christopher notes that the Perth suburb of Maylands has a vacancy rate of 0% with just one vacancy.

“What this means is that there is only one rental property being advertised online for a period of over three weeks for this postcode,” Christopher says.

The Hobart vacancy rate dropped from 2.1% from 1.9% during October, with just 443 rental properties available, according to SQM.

The Sydney market also tightened from 1.4% to 1.3% during October, though there are 800 more vacancies than there were a year ago, when the vacancy rate was 1.2%.

In terms of raw numbers, Darwin has the fewest number of available rentals at 261, though this is up from 216 in September. Darwin was also the only capital city to experience monthly growth, increasing by 0.2% during the month of October 2011.

Nationally, residential vacancies dipped slightly during the month of October, falling from 1.9% to 1.8%, or a total of 45,896 vacancies nationally.

Source: SQM Research

In the over-supplied Melbourne market, vacancies remained at 3%, well above the national average, and up from 2.6% a year ago. 

“On a grand scale we are definitely experiencing an excessively tight market, with only certain pockets of the country suffering an extreme level of vacancies such as Yan Yean South (3,754) in Victoria, which has recorded a vacancy rate of 19.5% for October, almost doubling its amount in vacancies year-on-year,” says Christopher. 

“For the meantime we do not see any light at the end of the tunnel where the rental market is concerned. The trends remain the same with no change in sight.” 

SQM’s calculations of vacancies are based on online rental listings that have been advertised for three weeks or more compared with the total number of established rental properties. 

SQM considers this a superior methodology compared with using a potentially incomplete sample of agency surveys or merely relying on online advertised listings.