Watch the scrum! Its the rental market!

As quickly as they’re hammered into the ground, ‘For Lease’ signs are disappearing from street frontages, as rental housing is snapped up by property hungry tenants.

Currently at Doyle Spillane we are experiencing great demand for all types of rental properties and last week we only had 3 properties out of the 1000 we currently manage vacant giving us an Occupancy Rate of 99.7% - which is a new record for our Company.

So what’s caused this? It’s a combination of factors:

• a drop in the number of people buying investment properties
• A lack of new investment properties available
• fewer first home buyers
• statistically we are coming into the best time of year “’Spring/Summer”

“Our inboxes are flooded with people enquiring after rental properties, and there are big numbers coming through our open house inspections,” explains Senior Property Manager Joe Iemma. “The return on rental properties has crept back to the levels that were being achieved a number of years ago - when a 5% return was the magical figure!”

In saying that the Northern Beaches Rental Market has been reasonably strong for the last 3-5 years with demand usually outstripping supply – but the current levels are a concern..

“Even though our occupancy rate is more than 99%,” Joe says. “Our aim is to attract quality tenants, who will look after the property and pay their rent, and this we will not compromise regardless of the rental amount being paid!”