Aiden Baxter and Hailey Cooper have managed to find a rental after searching for more than two months.
ONE young couple blighted by the ever-worsening rental crisis have struck it lucky after posting a plea on a social media site.
After more than two months of unsuccessful searching, Aiden Baxter, 24, and Hailey Cooper, 19, took to Facebook Marketplace in the hope someone would answer their plea.
They’re not the first to do so, but the strategy worked with a landlord offering them a place which they will move into in July.
The rental crisis on the Gold Coast continues to worsen with PropTrack data showing most affordable markets have been worst hit by surging demand, with applicants competing with twice as many people for a home than a year ago.
In Upper Coomera, for example, the number of prospective tenants over the past year jumped from 42 to 87 people per unit for rent with the average rent rising to $480.
For Aiden and Hailey, $450 a week, secured them a two-bedroom apartment in a small block of four in Chevron Island.
Aiden Baxter, 24 and Hailey Cooper, 19, hope to one day own their own home.
While Aiden says it is not exactly their dream home, they are grateful for it and prefer to view the apartment’s holes in the wall as a “touch of character”.
It is also, Aiden said, far better than some of the properties he had inspected.
“We had a budget of $500 a week and were basically hitting up agents anywhere along the Coast, from Coomera to Coolangatta. Some of the places were absolute dumps but the money people were asking for was shocking,” Aiden said.
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“There was one place in Miami where the landlord wanted close to $500 a week for a one-bedroom derelict beach shack that didn’t even have a stove. It looked like an old drug den. The owner hadn’t even bothered to try and fix it up.”
Aiden and Hailey are originally from Lismore but they decided to move to the Coast after being impacted by the floods.
“We lost our jobs and there was no food. We literally had to fight for everything, even just grocery shopping,” Aiden said.
The couple are currently staying with a friend in Oxenford in a bedroom where they can touch the walls when they stretch out their arms, but without it Aiden said they would never have been able to make the move.
However, since arriving on the Coast three months ago, they say the rental situation has worsened.
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var result = minutes + “:” + (seconds < 10 ? "0" + seconds : seconds); return result; } })(window.videojs); “At first we would go to an inspection and there would be about 30 or 40 people in total to compete with,” Aiden said. “In the past two to three weeks, when we turned up to places, there would be 30 to 40 people just in front of us and then the line would be snaking back down the street for hundreds of metres. It was crazy.” And the competition is fierce, according to Aiden, with people prepared to offer landlords more than $300 above the asking price. “We asked the agents what we could do to help set us apart, but they just said, ‘nothing really’. It just comes down to who the landlord wants at the end of the day,” he said. “If you needed emergency accommodation, you just wouldn’t find anything. “If we didn’t have a friend’s floor to sleep on we would have had to go back to Lismore.” The post Facebook plea finds young couple a home as rental crisis worsens appeared first on realestate.com.au.