Landlord’s secret Facebook post urging investors to band together to collude on price hikes sparks fury

A jaw-dropping post in a private Facebook group for landlords has sparked fury from a prominent renter advocate, who says it exposes the true nature of Australian property investors.

A member of the closed ‘Landlord’s (sic) Victoria’ group shared a post encouraging fellow investors to “be united” by colluding to increase rent prices uniformly.

The user complained that properties in suburbs in outer-Melbourne were achieving “low” rents in comparison to “states like Perth”.

The man suggested an organised increase of up to $200- per-week to put combined pressure on the market.

Jordan van den Berg, better known online as @purplepingers and founder of the S*** Rentals website, slammed the attitude of the landlord.

“The government has outsourced a core function, providing housing for people, to people like this,” Mr van den Berg said.

“This is the sort of greed that happens when providing a fundamental human right is no longer the responsibility of the government, but of idiots who don’t know how to spell ‘landlords’.”

But he encouraged landlords to make a public showing of price collusion, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as it might prompt fed-up renters to do the same.

“If they organise in a very visible way and make it clear that they’re working together to price you out of the market, that might inspire renters to organise too,” he said.

“Maybe renters could organise a rent strike where they stop paying. If you look at the data on distressed property sales, it’s clear many landlords have overextended themselves. It wouldn’t be very difficult at all to make a large group of landlords default on their mortgage.

“So, sure, you can organise if you want. We’ll organise too. F*** you.”

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Australia is in the midst of a crippling housing crisis, where high demand and a critically low supply of available homes have pushed prices sky high.

At a national level, the median rent price hit a new record high of $627 per week in April, representing a sharp 8.5 per cent increase in the past 12 months.

Across the capital cities, Perth has seen the biggest increase at 13.6 per cent year-on-year, followed by Melbourne at 9.6 per cent, Adelaide at 9.1 per cent, and Sydney at 9.0 per cent.

The recent Rental Affordability Snapshot prepared by Anglicare Australia found just 0.6 per cent of 45,115 for-lease listings examined were affordable to tenants working full-time and earning minimum wage.

Rental vacancy rates – that is, the proportion of all leased homes currently available on the market – is sitting at about one per cent in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and at just 0.6 per cent in Adelaide and Perth.

Federal politician Max Chandler-Mather, the Greens Party spokesman for housing and homelessness, said the Facebook post is an illustration of how badly broken the system is.

“Australia is getting smashed by the worst housing crisis in generations because Labor and the Liberals have written the laws to encourage people to treat housing as a lucrative financial asset, rather than as a place to call home,” Mr Chandler-Mather told news.com.au.

“Landlord Facebook groups like this are a perfect example of this exact problem.”

But Andrew Kent, president of the Australian Landlords Association, insisted the vast majority of Australia’s two million private property investors do the right thing.

“The post you refer to is not a reflection of landlords, and the approach is not supported by the Australian Landlords Association,” Mr Kent said.

Mr van den Berg rejected the claim and said the Facebook group and countless others like it are “filled with mum-and-dad landlords doing exactly what they say they don’t do”.

“Just have a browse through that group and you’ll see these aren’t fringe ideas,” he said.

“This is how landlords act and behave. Hearing the other end of the stories of landlords doing this to people for years, this is what they are. They’re lying. I don’t know how else to put it. Landlords are like this, and they’ve always been like this since landlords were invented.”

Despite highly publicised rent price increases, Mr Kent said most landlords view the risks associated with maintaining a leased property as outweighing the benefits, forcing “so many” to sell up and exit the market, he added.

“The practical considerations of being a landlord are being made increasingly difficult by various rounds of government legislation, which are increasing the cost of providing property for rent and decreasing the owners’ control of the property.”

Eighty per cent of rented dwellings in Australia are provided by private property investors, the vast majority of whom own just a single asset, he said.

Mr Kent said pressures on landlords will see many choose to throw in the towel, leaving tenants to pay the cost of even further reduced supply.

That view was echoed by commenters responding to the landlord’s Facebook post today, with one saying there’s “no need to take any action” because of the actions of the Victorian Government.

“With current trends and government policies targeting landlords, renters will ultimately face the consequences,” the user wrote.

“This will likely lead to a reduced housing supply and higher rents, which is bad for Victoria.”

Housing researcher Chris Martin doubts that scenario will play out.

Dr Martin, a senior research fellow at the City Futures Research Centre at UNSW Sydney, said studies indicated major legislative reform had minimal impact on rental dwelling supply.

“We did a statistical analysis of rental bond movement trends after two law reform instances, one in New South Wales in 2010 when there was a new act introduced, and in Victoria in 2015 when it kicked off its major reform process,” Dr Martin said.

“We didn’t see anything to support the contention that landlords have disinvested in response to legislation overhaul. The research on the matter debunks that argument.

“It can happen that landlords disinvest, but they probably tend to sell because it suits them. We’ve seen that in the past few years with investors realising some great profits because house prices have gone up so sharply.”

And when that matters, the vast majority of sales are to owner-occupiers, meaning it’s likely a renter will have exited the market alongside a leased dwelling, he said.

“In most cases, a person who would otherwise be a tenant, who buys a property and moves into it themselves, is no longer renting. At the market level, this idea that landlords can sell out and it suddenly becomes a much harsher place for tenants doesn’t really bear out.”

Mr Chandler-Mather said the idea expressed in the Facebook post, that landlords should ‘organise’ in order to move the market, is already a reality.

“There is literally nothing stopping landlords organising to jack up the rent because Labor refuses to put any sort of cap on rent increases to protect renters from predatory behaviour like this,” he said.

Mr van den Berg agreed, saying the idea of landlords banding together in solidarity happens, pointing to the number of vocal lobby and special interest groups representing their interests.

“The rich have class solidarity already. They have the Real Estate Institute of Victoria, they have the REIA (Real Estate Institute of Australia), they have rents rising year on year-on-year. They’re already doing what this landlord is suggesting, which is quite funny.”