Real estate agents in regional areas with housing shortages are asking prospective tenants to complete a rental application before letting them attend a property inspection.
Leo Patterson Ross, the chief executive of the Tenants Union, said this practice used to be rare but it had taken off in the past six months across regional NSW, including the Central Coast, Illawarra, Hunter Valley, New England and Riverina.
“Because the landlord generally has multiple applicants they operate a competitive system to choose,” Mr Patterson Ross said. “The more people they have, the more rapidly they want to cut down the list – and asking for applications up front is clearly a pretty effective method and has bonuses because it also gets all the info up front.”
Many regional areas are grappling with very low vacancy rates because of a housing shortage and an influx of city dwellers moving to regional areas in a trend sparked by the pandemic and working from home. The real estate industry uses a 3 per cent vacancy rate as a benchmark of what is “normal”, but SQM Research figures show vacancies are well below 1 per cent in most country towns and regional cities.
The Sun-Herald has seen several advertisements for rental properties on the Central Coast where the agents are requesting prospective tenants to fill out a rental application beforehand in order to be allocated a place at an inspection or to arrange a private viewing.
A three-bedroom house on Summerland Point, near Lake Macquarie, was advertised with instructions to complete an application form first. “This will allow our office to process your application and then make an individual inspection time if your application has been pre-approved.”
Several agencies advertising this process did not return calls.
Virgina Richardson found agents would destroy the applications, meaning they needed to be completed multiple times.CREDIT:RHETT WYMAN
Emily Sim, the chief executive of property management for Ray White, said it was a symptom of the low vacancy rate across the country.
Ms Sim said Ray White preferred online tenancy applications because tenants could complete one form for multiple properties and it cut down the time to process the application.
“We’re not requiring or encouraging it to be done in advance but on an individual office basis, they might be making their own policy around that, just trying to manage the numerous applications they’re getting,” she said.
Kelly Seaton, the owner of the Leasing Network in Bateau Bay, said demand for rental properties on the Central Coast started to pick up in October last year and it was now a crisis.
“I’ve been in the industry 27 years and I’ve never seen it like this,” she said. “People are desperate – it’s alarming.”
Ms Seaton said she does not ask prospective tenants to fill out an application in order to see a property and in her view it would be a waste of time to vet tenants beforehand in case they were not interested. However, some prospective clients chose to do the paperwork in advance so they were ready to go if they found something.
Jayne Pavic moved from Balmain to Forresters Beach on the Central Coast before Christmas with her husband and toddler and found the competition for rental properties intense, with properties being snapped up after two hours.
“We had to fill out the applications beforehand and it was really frustrating because … they weren’t all in the same system and it felt like a job application because we had to put so much detail in,” Ms Pavic said.
“We’re in our 30s and we’ve been renting for 10 years, and that’s never been the ask before, so I guess we took it as a signal of how competitive it is to get a place on the Central Coast.”
Virginia Richardson in East Gosford had a similar experience but added she had to fill out the paperwork twice for some agencies because they destroyed all the applications after each property was let.
Article Source: www.brisbanetimes.com.au
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