A photo of a flyer offering a service to landlords to evaluate their rent (Image: Supplied)
A photo of a flyer offering a service to landlords to evaluate their rent (Image: Supplied)

Australia is in a rental crisis.

Even as astronomical property prices have begun falling thanks to rising interest rates, the “rental markets are extremely tight and are expected to tighten further”, according to PropTrack’s director of economic research Cameron Kushner. 

That’s jargon for: more people are competing for a small number of properties, driving up rents. This means more money for the people and companies who have already managed to buy their own place. 

Australians who don’t already own a home face the unenviable prospect of spending enormous amounts of their income on renting a place at the whim of someone else; or trying to scrape enough — somehow! — to try and buy their own property, which is no longer an option for many people.

The number of people buying their first home has dropped to its lowest point in the past half decade. It’s getting harder.

Understandably, there’s not a lot of sympathy out there for landlords and their real estate agents (who came third last in the Governance Institute of Australia’s 2022 Ethics Index, just before federal and state politicians).

This might explain the reaction to a Sydney real estate agent’s advertisement that blew up on social media this week. A now-deleted post to the r/Sydney subreddit showed a flyer for the services of a “rentals expert” emblazoned with the text: “Landlords, rents are at a new level. Is yours too low?”

The advertisement then instructs the reader to text their address to the agent, who Crikey has chosen not to name, to find out if their rent is too low in just three minutes. The flyer’s kicker is a picture of the agent with a speech bubble coming out of their mouth, saying: “We never sleep 24/7”.

The response on Reddit and across other social media platforms was livid. People vented their frustration at what they perceived as an unfeeling pitch to help the landed gentry squeeze as much as they could out of struggling renters.  

“Fucking parasites,” one user wrote.

“Seeing this after crying for 6 hours at my desk while filling out a social housing application is… radical,” another responded.

What caught my eye, however, was the second half of the flyer. The promise of service at any hour of the day was intriguing. After all, imagine being a landlord and being suddenly struck with the realisation at 5.01pm that you might not be scraping every cent out of a working mother tenant? God forbid.

Could this promise be real? Does the agent really not sleep? Surely that’s ill-advised even if it is impressive. It is a literally unbelievable claim and one that deserves to be tested. Here at Crikey, we pride ourselves on the thoroughness of our reporting. So, we decided to find out.

I am not a night owl, so I instead planned to wake up by setting an alarm for 1.30am. I struggled to get to sleep like a kid before Christmas. When my alarm went off, I felt like I’d barely slept. I groggily turned over, rubbed my eyes and picked up my phone. The screen’s brightness felt like it drilled straight into my prefrontal cortex. I ignored the group chat messages, endless news outlet push notifications and opened my messaging app. 

In preparation, I’d already typed the agent’s number into my phone, but I left the magic of typing in my address until the moment. I simply tapped it out, pressed send and, with a swooshing sound effect, it was gone.

I don’t know what I expected to get back. I just sat upright in bed and waited. One minute passed, so I closed my eyes. Two minutes. And then — nothing. Three minutes passed and it wasn’t long after that I drifted back to sleep. 

When I woke up this morning, I had nothing. At the time of publication, I’ve yet to hear back from them. One explanation for my ghosting might be because many of the users replying to the advertisement posted on social media promised to call and text at ungodly hours — which was distinct from my legitimate, good faith request, I swear. 

But I’ve settled on being happy that it wasn’t available. Australia is caught between treating housing as a human right and our primary source of wealth building. It’s great to talk about the merits of the invisible hand of the market that will incentivise increasing supply if there’s demand, but what if you’re caught in a moment of “market inefficiency”? There are too many people who want to rent and not enough places to go around right now.

Something needs to change. But in the meantime, I’m happy if the people who promise to wring as much money from renters as possible are sleeping on the job.

The real estate agency has been contacted for comment.