Rent Tracker - Sneak peek

We've previously written about the various ways people can track rent movements in Sydney. We plan to continue this practice in our new series "Rent Tracker."

This is a brief sneak peek while we work on adding all sorts of improvements. We've two substantial changes to note.

Previously, we tracked the 'asking rents' reported by APM against the rents tenants actually pay, as presented in the Rent and Sales Report and in the CPI - Sydney Rents series.

For this and subsequent issues, we've added two new 'asking rent' trackers - CoreLogic RP Data (until very recently known as RP Data), and SQM Research.

To make it easy for you, we'll be keeping these colours for each series in all our graphs! Clicking on each graph will get you the bigger version.

First, let's introduce CoreLogic RP Data and SQM Research.

Both are independent data researchers that primarily focus on property. CoreLogic is an international group that acquired RP Data in 2011, but only recently changed the name to match.

We will primarily be looking at RP Data's Quarterly Rental Reviews, or Quarterly Property Reports where the Review is unavailable.

SQM Research publishes a Weekly Asking Rents Index on their website, which will be the source of data for them. SQM publish prices for all houses, and 3 br houses, all units and 2 bedroom units. For consistency with the other measures, we will be using their all houses and all units measures. SQM publish a methodology for their index here.

Both CoreLogic RP Data and SQM Research primarily scour property listing websites for asking rents to gather their data.

Sydney Rents

First, median rents for houses and units for the last 18 months, and the difference between asking rents and actual rents is noticeable.We've adjusted for inflation to September 2014 here, which produces a flatter image, though the slow rise is clear as well. 

SQM prices houses at a much higher level than other data houses, we'll be seeking comment from them. Interestingly, their unit prices are lower than even the Rent and Sales Report.

We're also looking at producing a couple of indexes to try and give an broader perspective on the narrative that gets played out in the media whenever rent prices are reported on. The following graphs show one of two ways of we'll use to indexing our five data series. The indices purpose is to try and represent movement, rather than merely the data points of the series.

These indices demonstrate the relative movements of rent prices together. This represents clearly that the actual rents have been rising much faster than the asking rents would suggest, particularly in houses, and particularly with APM but certainly all three asking rent series show flat periods while the actual rents catch up. This becomes an issue when the media narrative describes flat periods in prices, when we should be talking about how much more unaffordable rents are getting!

We'll begin to look at what all this means in the New Year, and look forward to bringing you more numbers, including regional reporting, in subsequent instalments!