Beautician Jess Buswell pays $550 a week for a room she shares with her partner Richie Tielemans in a house in Karratha. Picture: Aaron Bunch
Source: The Australian
RENTERS are paying up to $3500 a week for a five-bedroom house in the remote red-dirt Pilbara as the resources boom ramps up 1300km from Perth.
Even a two-bedroom house can set you back a staggering $2300 a week, and a small one-bedroom “cottage” is listed for $1800 a week.
The latest quarterly snapshot of Pilbara housing shows rents at record highs in Port Hedland and Karratha, the towns at the centre of the boom.
Homes are being rented for more than four times the median rent in Sydney, Perth, Brisbane and Melbourne as landlords, often arms-length investors from Perth and other states, reap extraordinary rewards.
Some are charging more than $3000 a week for houses they bought for $200,000 a decade ago.
The Pilbara Development Commission survey found the average rent for a house in Port Hedland was now $1861 a week and $1700 in Karratha.
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Beautician Jess Buswell, 25, and her partner Richie Tielemans, 40, pay $550 a week for one bedroom in an unassuming four-bedroom house in Karratha.
They have no control over who moves in and have to share with another couple and two single men. There is one bathroom and one toilet for the six of them.
“It’s really hard. There’s no privacy; we’ve had things stolen, people eat our food, use our stuff, and you get all these strangers coming in,” Ms Buswell said.
For the same money they could rent a whole house in Perth and still have change.
Real Estate Industry of Australia data shows the median rent for a house in Sydney is $400 a week. In Perth it is $390, Melbourne $336, Brisbane $350, Darwin $526, Canberra $450, Adelaide $320 and Hobart $360.
While prices fluctuate according to size and suburb, even a three-bedroom house less than 6km from the Sydney CBD averages just $720 a week, less than half the median Pilbara rent.
Mr Tielemans, a stevedore, is one of an army of Pilbara workers earning well over $100,000 a year on the back of the boom, but he said people shouldn’t be fooled — the big money came from long hours of overtime and didn’t go far on top of “ridiculous” food and power bills because of the blistering heat and hefty transport costs.
“We came up here two years ago to try and get ourselves ahead and I am saving money because of all the overtime I do, but there’d be nothing if we got our own place,” he said.
The PDC survey found buying a house was also not for the faint-hearted, with prices generally about $1 million and up to $2.3m in Port Hedland and $1.7m in Karratha.
The data coincides with weeks of protected industrial action by maritime workers at Mermaid Marine’s Dampier supply base, 30km from Karratha.
Maritime Union of Australia organiser Doug Heath said a key concern was the allowance paid to workers to cover the “astronomic” cost of living there. He said they received a $670 a week allowance, or $430 after tax. “You can’t even rent one room in a four-bedroom house in share accommodation for that. We’re after a net payment of around $780 a week, which will still only pay for half a house in terms of the rent,” he said.
Karratha Districts Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief Brent McKenna moved to Karratha from Melbourne a month ago and spent his first week in a tent. He found a room only after a wealthy stranger who owned his own home took pity on him.
“It’s unbelievable. The rest of the country is clueless about what it’s like up here,” Mr McKenna said. “On the one hand the visionaries are talking about creating two cities of 50,000 people, but the reality is that the speed with which land is being released does not in any way match that.”
Local real estate agent Jan Ford said more homes were being built as part of the Barnett government’s Pilbara Cities vision, but it would take time and she did not expect rents to fall for at least four years.
She said the high rents were a serious problem for people in service industries, but not many were left. “In the part of town where I live, just a kilometre from the GPO, I could walk down there and have five restaurants to choose from in the night time 10 years ago. Now there’s none.
“If people aren’t involved in the resources industry they generally aren’t here, so even though it sounds horrific and you think, oh my God, how can people afford to live’, basically you come up here to work and everything is relative.”