THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Rent crisis: 87,000 properties ‘empty’, water’s on, no-one’s home

Rent crisis: 87,000 properties ‘empty’, water’s on, no-one’s home

Only a minority of these homes will be actually unused but some will be -- particularly homes owned by people living overseas. Some owners are so wary of the unrecoverable damage that tenants can and do sometimes inflict that they regard protecting their investment as a higher priority than renting it out for income.

And given the extremely pro-tenant laws, who could be blamed for not wanting to tangle with tenants? Landlord protection laws would put most of the properties into the rental market but there is no prospect of such laws emerging. Government meddling in the market is once again producing perverse behaviour. Legislation designed to help tenants in fact hurts them. At the very least, it pushes up their costs

I in fact have a rental property that I do not rent out even though it is little used. I prefer to keep it available for occasional use by family rather than bother with tenants and all the "protections" that come with them. I am not even allowed to bar pets these days. Awful of me but if you smell what some pets do to carpet you will understand. I have been a landlord. I know.

If tenants want more choice of housing, they should be telling governments to back off -- which is exactly the opposite of what is proposed below. The proposals below would undoubtedly take even more housing out of the rental market. You can only push people so far. And guess what? Landlords are people too!

Despite the worst rental crisis on record, about 87,000 ‘empty’ homes are not being put to work prompting calls for penalties against owners who don’t rent them out.

Shock analysis of the latest housing data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows around 87,000 Qld residential properties that aren’t the main home of their owners were not being rented out, a figure which stretches out to 577,000 nationally.

An ABS spokeswoman said “the data includes properties used for other purposes, such as holiday homes, second residences, dwellings occupied rent-free by family members etc”.

Veteran property expert Michael Matusik said new tax measures were necessary to incentivise or penalise owners to release the homes for rent given how tight the market was.

“Around 29 per cent of investment properties are not rented out. They are sitting there vacant.,” he said.

Exclusive data from Qld’s biggest water provider, Urban Utilities, revealed 19,500 homes across lower SEQ had their water connection on, but noone seemed to be home for months.

Spokeswoman Michelle Cull said the firm provided water and sewage for around 590,000 residential properties in Brisbane, Ipswich, Somerset, Scenic Rim and Lockyer Valley – with new data finding about 3.3 per cent had low or no water consumption over a three-month period.

“According to our water usage data, around 19,500 properties in our service region had a water usage of between zero and two kilolitres during the last quarter of 2021 (October to December),” Ms Cull said.

“Properties may have no or low water usage for a range of reasons including the use of water tanks instead of town water supply, residents could be away from home, or the property could be vacant or uninhabitable.”

Unitywater executive manager customer and community Katherine Gee said their numbers showed 2,104 houses that used 1,000 litres or less water over a 90 day period – of which 96 were in Noosa, 1,020 on the Sunshine Coast and 988 in Moreton Bay.

“It is important to note that it cannot be categorically stated that these properties are ‘vacant’. We operate in a desirable region and some of these properties may be holiday homes or homes that are occupied for only parts of the year,” she said.

Mackay Regional Council confirmed it too had zero/low consumption segments “however, this is not a definite indication that the property is vacant” given “the property owner may be away for an extended period, it could be a holiday home or estate or the owner may have another water source (rainwater/bore)”.

The figures for ‘empty’ apartments are harder to get given “there are a significant number of residential units/complexes that feed off a single meter and it will depend if each unit/complex are separate parcels of land (lot and plan),” a Mackay spokeswoman said.

The rental crisis spurred Brisbane Mayor Adrian Schrinner to open the floodgates over under-utilised rental properties, announcing “significantly higher rates” for landlords who “turned homes into mini hotels”.

“If owners have these properties in the market for a short term, that is their choice, but what they’ll be facing now is a 50 per cent increase in their rates. We’re excluding (those that rent out) individual rooms. This is about people who rent out the whole house.”

The city saw house rent surge 22 per cent in the past year to $610 a week, with units up 11.2 per cent to $430 a week, latest SQM Research data found. It put Brisbane’s vacancy rate at 0.7 per cent – its tightest level in history – with listings almost halving in one year (-46 per cent) to 2,200.

There are now calls for the Qld Government to step up, with Strata Community Association Qld president Kristi Kinast repeating calls for legislation to allow bodies corporate to ban short-term letting.

“This is currently impossible for 99 per cent of Queensland’s strata communities,” she said. “SCA Qld believes this is a good policy that will help alleviate rental shortages and discourage short-term letting in strata schemes that were not intended for that purpose.”

The Federal Government’s whip has been a vacancy fee penalty – enforced against international buyers who leave their real estate investments empty.

Australian Taxation Office figures show it collected $2.3m in penalties in 2021, $3.7m in 2019/20 and $1.8m in its first year of collection (2018/19).

Prosper Australia director of advocacy Karl Fitzgerald said foreign investors were not solely to blame for empty or under-utilised homes, with “speculative vacancies” by Australian investors curbing supply and pushing prices higher.

He said governments needed to reduce incentives for short-term profiteering from housing.

“Higher land taxes, more effective vacancy taxes and even curbing interest-only loans could all help. Switching away from stamp duties and towards land taxes – the ultimate vacancy tax – is a vital step forward.”

The best form of vacancy tax locally, Mr Fitzgerald said, would be to replace stamp duty with a land tax set at a significant rate of about 1.5 per cent of site values.

He said the ATO should also consider denying depreciation as a tax write-off if a property owner did not put it up for rent at a competitive rate. “Further investigation is needed of an incremental land tax for sites that refuse to be put to work.”

https://www.couriermail.com.au/property/rent-crisis-87000-properties-empty-waters-on-noones-home/news-story/3ca0caf5850f074335aac1999085f45c

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Rent crisis: 87,000 properties ‘empty’, water’s on, no-one’s home

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