• maegul (he/they)
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    6 months ago

    The pandemic is an obvious inflection point in many of these graphs.

    What exactly is that mechanism or process? That rents have gone up makes sense as passing on interest rate increases. But vacancy rates going down? There aren’t more people all of a sudden (it was a pandemic not a baby boom).

    • hitmyspot@aussie.zone
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      6 months ago

      Work from home. People use an extra room as an office instead of a roommate. Commercial property is at lower capacity. It’s a refit in how we use space.

      I would not be surprised if there was an increase in seperate ons and increase in people living without others, irrespective of work arrangements. What’s odd, is that there has not been a rejigger again since rents started rising.

      I think travel was also booming after Covid, so airbnbs were probably going gangbusters. Not so much any more, but the market probably hasn’t adjusted yet.

      It’s probably a combination of all of these, and other factors.

    • Taleya@aussie.zone
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      6 months ago

      Lockdowns taught a lot of people that they fucking hated their roommates, or their tiny apartments, or both

      • maegul (he/they)
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        6 months ago

        Yea right. If people left tiny apartments, that should balance out in terms of vacancy rates though. Plus I knew of some people that really hated living alone and so presumably sought to live with someone else.

        But share houses blowing up makes a lot of sense.

        I wonder if there’s a demographics to it as well, where millennials are now middle aged, and so either more entitled in their residential “needs” or starting families, with the pandemic suddenly accelerating that trend. But in reality, was it a very foreseeable trend?

    • Dave@lemmy.nz
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      6 months ago

      Over here in NZ we had the biggest influx of expats back to NZ in memory. Perhaps you had the same?

      Another possibility is perhaps a drop in the number of rental properties overall. Money got cheap, house prices went up, perhaps lots of landlords sold up, and lots of renters suddenly could afford to buy?

        • Dave@lemmy.nz
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          6 months ago

          Yeah, everyone came back to NZ to weather the storm, then left again. People are leaving pretty much as fast as their passports can be issued, which is pretty slow at the moment. Prepandemic passports for most people were issued within a few days. Now it’s taking 10 weeks.

          I don’t think this was unexpected, there was always the expectation that people would leave once the pandemic had settled down.

          Not only is there a bunch of people who came back and are now leaving, all the people who would have left during the pandemic but couldn’t will now be making their move.