Australian Bureau of Statistics data from Census night in August 2021 showed 118,109 West Australian homes were unoccupied,accounting for around one in every 10 dwelling across the state.
Census data has revealed the Perth suburbs where there are plenty of homes sitting empty.Getty Images
Apartment-dense suburbs including Perth’s CBD,East Perth,Northbridge,Burswood,West Perth,Maylands,South Perth and Rivervale had one in every five to six homes vacant.
One in every seven homes in the wealthy suburbs of Cottesloe,Claremont and Crawley in Perth’s golden triangle were also empty,despite the median price for a house in Cottesloe being more than $3 million.
University of Western Australia social demographer Amanda Davies said people in higher socio-economic areas were more likely to have multiple homes.
“They may have a second home for when people come and visit them,and they just have that level of financial resourcing available to them that it doesn’t matter if it remains empty,” she said.
“They might not have a need to rent it,or sometimes renting can create a tax issue.”
Suburbs in Perth’s middle belt,between 15 and 30 kilometres from the city,had fewer empty homes,with Landsdale,Iluka,Hocking,Darch,Wattle Grove and South River among the areas with the least unoccupied dwellings in the metropolitan region.
“Ellenbrook’s another really good example of a large amount of housing stock with very low vacancy rates and that is fundamentally because it’s a middle-class suburb where people buy and they own their own house,and they make their lives there;it’s not a rental suburb,people don’t invest in properties like that,and so people tend to stay,” Davies said.
Inner-city suburbs such as South Perth,Rivervale and East Perth,however,had a higher proportion of people moving between properties,which meant some were temporarily vacant.
“When you start looking at older suburbs like Rivervale,Victoria Park,Lathlain,Bayswater,those suburbs are still being gentrified,or still being renovated,so you will see that level of vacancy just a little bit higher,” Davies said.
“And then of course those suburbs also have urban infill and apartments which tend to attract a slightly higher level of vacancy.
“There are also people who just keep their second property vacant;South Perth,for example,was always known as a farmers’ town where lots of people from the Wheatbelt area bought into villa-style complexes but live out of Perth.”
The Agency Perth real estate agent Anil Singh,who specialises in the Rivervale property market,said the suburb’s vacancy rate of one in every six properties was likely due to the area’s new apartment complexes,its fly-in,fly-out residents,and investment properties.
The suburb is nestled on the Swan River between the city and Perth Airport.
“Overseas investors are buying new apartments off the plan and sometimes they do sit vacant for a while before they either get leased out or people have intentions of just having a holiday apartment here,” Singh said.
“I’ve got a few clients who have holiday apartments here that live in Malaysia and Singapore and come to Perth twice to three times a year,occupy it,and the rest of the time it just sits empty.”
The suburbs with the most unoccupied homes were typically in regional holiday areas or fly-in,fly-out mining towns,with Eagle Bay – a popular summer escape south of Perth – having 80 per cent of its homes unoccupied.
Emma Baker,a professor of housing research at the University of Adelaide,said the number of empty homes across Greater Perth was partially a reflection of the “haphazard” way Australia collected housing data.
“Not many of the empty houses are genuinely just sitting there waiting for someone to come and live in them,” she said.
“The census was conducted on a cold winter’s night,so a lot of the empty houses would have been holiday homes in places where no one bothered to respond to the census.”
Of the approximately 9 million homes in Australia,about 1 million did not return a census form.