The Brisbane estate agent’s email has been praised for telling landlords not to pay rents that are too high

A real estate agent has berated her landlord clients for raising rent too much, with mystified tenants welcoming the “brutal truth” of her comments.

Ping Han of Place Sunnybank in South Brisbane’s Macgregor sent out a targeted newsletter to owners – which was posted on social media this week.

Ms Han said landlords should be mindful of the plight of tenants and not overprice their investment properties amid the city’s exceptionally low vacancy rates.

She added that some landlords may have missed the point about their tenants’ affordability amid the turmoil tenants are facing.

“This is what most landlords don’t like to hear about, but most of the time it’s also the brutal truth,” Ms Han said.

The bold comments come as SQM Research found that vacancy rates in Brisbane had fallen to 0.8 percent last January.

Numbers have plummeted since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, while the city’s rents have also risen by a whopping 24.8 percent in the last 12 months to January this year.

The real estate director said in the letter that she has seen tenants cough up $150 more per week in the properties she manages, compared to last year.

“However, tenants’ wages have not increased that much, while food prices are also rising, many good tenant families have gone through a real struggle,” said Ms. Han.

“If you have a property to rent online and you’ve been waiting for weeks and no good application comes in, you’re more likely to be overpriced,” she added.

said Mrs. Han Yahoo News Australia she sensed the “conflict of interest” between helping her clients and protecting tenants.

“We must do everything in the interest of the client, the landlord, but we owe the tenants a duty of care,” she said.

“You have to be honest and landlords have to be careful that the poor tenants have reached their capacity. It’s very, very difficult for them and that’s why we’re seeing more and more vacancies.’

The co-owner of the real estate arm also said her company has seen an alarming trend of lease cancellations in January as tenants couldn’t keep up with the pressure of rising rents.

“We had the highest number of broken leases in January 2023 compared to previous years,” she said.

‘Most tenants indicate that they will no longer be able to afford them in the long term with the current high rent.’

Instead, tenants have been hunting for their own property further away from the city “so they have an asset that is theirs,” she said.

The agent said she had canceled six to 10 leases in a two to three week period, which was “very unusual.”

“Many tenants say: we would like to stay here and we have been with you for years, but we cannot accept the rent, it is beyond our capacity,” said Ms. Han.

Her comments were welcomed by tired tenants on social media this week.

‘A [real estate] newsletter in which landlords are informed that their rent may be too high. Now only the rest must follow,” reads one post.

“Maybe I’ll have to look for a new place in a few months. This desk will be the very first one I look at,” said one tenant.

“I did not expect this from a real estate company,” wrote another.

“I was expecting something more along the lines of ‘make sure your tenants have two kidneys so they can sell one if you raise the rent by $150 a week’.”

“They would like to be careful, they will be expelled from the real estate association because they are not parasites,” one commenter warned.

“You know times are tough when property managers tell you rents are too high,” said another.

Meanwhile, SQM Research’s managing director, Louis Christopher, said he had never seen such a large increase in rents with this current generation in the past year across Brisbane.

“The last time we had a 24.8 per cent increase in Brisbane, or even the country as a whole, was way back in the 1970s,” he said. Vastgoed.com.au last month.

This is rampant rent inflation that the ABS still hasn’t accounted for [Australian Bureau of Statistics] in their CPI rental index series.’

Rising rents and a lack of rental housing have plagued the country over the past 12 months.

Nationally, rents rose 6.7 percent to a median of $495 a week in 2022, but the problem was much worse in capital cities.

In cities such as Melbourne and Sydney, higher post-Covid demand for fewer homes drove unit rents up 9.3 percent, while houses rose 8.3 percent.