Australian houses

PHOTO: Vacant property data has shown ghost towns are emerging at both ends of the housing market spectrum 

Census data has revealed a million houses are sitting empty in towns where, just metres away, working families are being forced to live in tents.

Analysis of 2021 vacant property data has shown ghost towns are emerging at both ends of the housing market spectrum — in wealthy coastal areas and declining inland farming towns — at a time of unprecedented demand for rentals and soaring homelessness rates.

Libby Stapleton, mayor of Victoria’s Surf Coast Shire where the majority of houses in towns like Lorne and Apollo Bay are vacant investment properties, said it had become a “massive issue”.

Profile of a woman overlooking a beach.
Libby Stapleton says people have the right to holiday homes, but the situation in some towns is unsustainable.(Supplied: Surf Coast Shire)

“It’s frustrating because our communities will not thrive unless they can sustain a permanent population, accommodate key workers, and also retain some fabric of community life.”

Local governments are taking novel approaches to try to squeeze properties onto the rental market, including writing to non-resident ratepayers pleading with them to rent out their holiday homes and slugging absent owners with financial penalties.

But like many community leaders, Ms Stapleton said the onus was on state and federal governments to find both short and long-term solutions to normalise the housing market.

People on a beach.
Apollo Bay is a popular tourist destination in the summer months.(Commons: Alex Proimos)

“Councils are doing what they can, but to be honest we will only ever be able to tweak around the edges,” she said.

“There’s no doubt that the need for change is urgent and it’s immediate. I think it’s really crucial that people understand the enormity of the impacts that are being felt.

“I think as long as we’ve got policies and a taxation system that treats housing as an investment as opposed to a basic need, it will continue to be an issue.”

Where are the ghost towns?

A breakdown of the census data on unoccupied homes showed a patchwork of under-utilised housing stock in both coastal and inland areas.

A head and shoulders shot of Professor Amanda Davies posing for a photo in an office in front of a bookcase.
Professor Amanda Davies says demographic shifts will increase pressure on the vexed issue of taxation reform in the property market.(ABC News: Herlyn Kaur)

Some hotspots were trendy, wealthy, seaside towns where out-of-town owners chose to keep them empty or rent them out for brief periods via short-stay accommodation apps.

At the other end of the spectrum was empty housing stock in seasonal or shrinking farming communities.

“There are two key stories that are standing out in the data,” said demography academic Professor Amanda Davies.

“There is second-home ownership, with our baby boomer population having second homes and holiday homes, and these are mainly vacant because census night is in August in winter.

“And then you have the remote or regional areas where there is seasonal labour, [where houses] are empty when there’s no harvesting.

Some of the most extreme examples of unused homes were recorded on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula and Phillip Island, where in suburbs like Portsea three-quarters of properties were empty.

Unusually high vacancy rates were also recorded along Great Ocean Road townships, on the Queensland coast, and in the surfing towns of southern Western Australia.

The figures are not considered precise due to the myriad reasons people are absent on census night, but the findings correlate with anecdotal evidence and other data relating to investment properties.

Holiday home owners answer plea

The data comes as regional residents take increasingly desperate measures to find shelter amid the unprecedented mismatch between the supply of and demand for housing.

Kiama viewed from above in a drone photograph.
Out-of-town owners in seaside towns like Kiama choose to keep holiday homes empty.(ABC Illawarra: Justin Huntsdale )

Some towns are reporting a surge in people buying tents to live in, while community services in areas like the WA Wheatbelt are having to return people to the streets with swags and tents.

And there are discussions around repurposing unused government properties for crisis accommodation in places like Newcastle and Eden along the NSW coast.

Several shires have resorted to asking holiday home owners to rent their second properties out to homeless locals, despite that option being less lucrative than renting them on short-stay accommodation apps like Airbnb.

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