Victoria is raising minimum rental standards

Victoria is raising minimum rental standards

This week, the Victorian Government proposed new minimum requirements for rental properties and rooming or boarding houses, to be phased in from October 2025.

Associate Professor Trivess Moore is available for media interviews following his co-written article, Victoria is raising minimum rental standards – it’s good news for tenants and the environment in The Conversation.

Key points:

  • The new standards will greatly improve the quality and comfort of rental housing. They will also make it cheaper to live in.
  • It’s the most far-reaching response by any Australian government to the huge and well-documented problems of affordability and poor conditions in our rental housing.
  • The potential challenges include:
    • many landlords are already financially stretched and may pass on improvement costs to tenants or exit the market, but research indicates the likely impact of these responses is low
    • changes will supercharge the retrofit industry, so strict governance will be needed to avoid issues with “cowboy” operators, as happened with schemes such as the Home Insulation Program – the so-called “pink batts” scheme
    • labour shortages across the construction industry mean more workers will have to be found to deliver these upgrades
    • we don’t yet know what the processes will be for checking compliance and providing recourse if upgrades fall short of requirements
    • tenants may hesitate to assert their rights because affordable rental housing is so hard to find safeguards will be needed to protect tenants from rent increases
    • there is a risk of gentrification if landlords decide to comprehensively retrofit and renovate homes.

Dr Trivess Moore’s research focuses on the technical, social and policy aspects of how households and the housing sector will transition to a low carbon future. His book, A Transition to Sustainable Housing, explores the need to rethink the way we plan, design, construct, use and retrofit housing.

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General media enquiries: RMIT Communications, 0439 704 077 or news@rmit.edu.au

07 June 2024

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07 June 2024

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