One in every five homes in Perth’s inner suburbs sit empty – this despite the state’s rental crisis and the nearly 19,000 applicants on a public housing wait list.
According to the ABS data from census night in August 2021, 118,109 West Australian homes were vacant, accounting for around one in every 10 dwellings across the state.
One in every five to six homes was unoccupied in the apartment-dense suburbs of Perth’s CBD, East Perth, Northbridge, Burswood, West Perth, Maylands, South Perth, and Rivervale, WAtoday reported.
The wealthy suburbs of Cottesloe, Claremont, and Crawley in Perth’s golden triangle had one in every seven homes sitting empty, despite the more than $3 million median house price in Cottesloe.
Amanda Davies, a social demographer at University of Western Australia, said it was more likely for people in higher socio-economic areas to own multiple homes.
“They may have a second home for when people come and visit them, and they just have that level of financial resourcing available to them that it doesn’t matter if it remains empty,” Davies said. “They might not have a need to rent it, or sometimes renting can create a tax issue.”
In Perth’s middle belt, around 15km to 30km from the city, the suburbs there had fewer empty homes, with Landsdale, Iluka, Hocking, Darch, Wattle Grove, and South River among the areas with the least unoccupied dwellings in the metropolitan region.
“Ellenbrook’s another really good example of a large amount of housing stock with very low vacancy rates and that is fundamentally because it’s a middle-class suburb where people buy and they own their own house, and they make their lives there; it’s not a rental suburb, people don’t invest in properties like that, and so people tend to stay,” Davies said.
Some homes in the inner-city suburbs such as South Perth, Rivervale, and East Perth, meanwhile, were temporarily vacant due to a higher proportion of people moving between properties.
“When you start looking at older suburbs like Rivervale, Victoria Park, Lathlain, Bayswater, those suburbs are still being gentrified, or still being renovated, so you will see that level of vacancy just a little bit higher,” Davies said. “And then of course those suburbs also have urban infill and apartments which tend to attract a slightly higher level of vacancy.
“There are also people who just keep their second property vacant; South Perth, for example, was always known as a farmers’ town where lots of people from the Wheatbelt area bought into villa-style complexes but live out of Perth.”
In Rivervale, the suburb nestled on the Swan River between the city and Perth Airport, the vacancy rate was one in every six properties. Anil Singh, The Agency Perth real estate agent, said this was likely due to the suburb’s new apartment complexes, its fly-in, fly-out residents, and investment properties.
“Overseas investors are buying new apartments off the plan and sometimes they do sit vacant for a while before they either get leased out or people have intentions of just having a holiday apartment here,” Singh said.
“I’ve got a few clients who have holiday apartments here that live in Malaysia and Singapore and come to Perth two to three times a year, occupy it, and the rest of the time it just sits empty.”
The suburbs in regional holiday areas or fly-in, fly-out mining towns typically had the most unoccupied homes, with Eagle Bay having 80% of its homes vacant.
Emma Baker, a professor of housing research at the University of Adelaide, said the number of empty homes across Greater Perth partially reflected the “haphazard” way Australia collected housing data.
“Not many of the empty houses are genuinely just sitting there waiting for someone to come and live in them,” Baker said. “The census was conducted on a cold winter’s night, so a lot of the empty houses would have been holiday homes in places where no-one bothered to respond to the census.”
About one million of the roughly nine million Australian homes did not return a census form, WAtoday reported.
What can you say about the number of vacant homes sitting empty in Perth? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below.
