What’s Driving the Rental Demand?

While everybody is stocking up on icy poles and sunscreen to ride-out Queensland’s vicious heatwave, we are experiencing a ‘heatwave’ of our own in real estate- huge demand for rental properties.

There has been much reported on the current spike in rental demand across the Sunshine Coast. To create some perspective around this, Ray White Maroochydore currently conducts 50 open homes per week with well in excess of 20 registered enquiries on most properties. One property had over 100 people registered to attend the open home conducted this week.

There are three (3) main reasons driving this ‘spike’ in demand:

1) There was a continual building of momentum over the last 12-18 months. This rolling momentum has resulted in fewer available properties for rent. Currently our vacancy rate is sitting at 0.38% this figure sits well below the industry standard of 2-3%.

2) Agencies generally work in advance to ensure that lease agreements do not expire 2 weeks either side of Christmas. This is to avoid the busy Christmas period with notoriously lower staff levels and so as to try and minimise disruption for tenants over Christmas. Therefore, most tenancy agreements are still in place so during this time there are even less vacant properties in the market.

3) The beginning of a New Year means an influx of new residents moving to the coast in December/January.This 2 month (or 60 day period) is pushed into a 40 day period due to Christmas, therefore the level of enquiry is far more rushed and active.

We believe that this is a short term bubble at a notoriously busy time of the year, so a better picture of the rental market will be available over 3 months. Watch this space.