Renters struggle to find homes

Rotorua Rentals owner Richard Evans said houses were being snapped up as soon as they became available.

Rotorua's rental market is "getting stressful" with desperate tenants willing to sign up for the right home sight unseen.

The number of Rotorua three-bedroom family homes for rent on Trade Me has dwindled from 76 in the past six weeks to just 38 yesterday.

And the growing shortage is partly due to landlords returning to the city from overseas to live in their homes, agents say.

Rotorua Rentals owner Richard Evans said houses were being snapped up as soon as they became available.

"It's getting a bit stressful," he said.

"When you get a reasonable looking house listed you get eight or nine emails by the end of the day, half a dozen phone calls. It's heart-breaking.

"We've got good people that we can't help."

Mr Evans said one couple relocating from Auckland could not find a home after two weeks.

"They've a friend who is a lawyer and who will sign a tenancy agreement for them as soon as they find something, sight unseen."

He said rentals with three or more bedrooms and in the "popular" suburbs of Lynmore, Springfield, Tihiotonga, Kawaha Point and Glenholme were hard to find.

Mr Evans said he knew of 11 landlords who had moved back to Rotorua from overseas and back into the homes they had rented out. Aucklanders buying properties were not contributing to the shortage, he said, as many were already existing rentals.

Ross Stanway, chief executive of Realty Services, which operates Eves and Bayleys Real Estate, agreed.

"A lot of the people who left the Bay of Plenty to live and work in Australia are now returning home," he said.

"Some of these people didn't sell their homes so they are now taking up residence in their properties."

LJ Hooker Rotorua principal Malcolm Forsyth said just two of the 300 properties the company managed were currently vacant.

"We've never had such low numbers of stock available for rent," he said. "We've got 20 to 30 people just coming in the door every day just enquiring about rental properties and we've got two available," he said.

"There are more and more people who just are not able to find properties to rent."

He thought the demand for rentals would continue and prices would keep rising for the foreseeable future.

"Because we don't have the supply, because of the demand, there's only one way that rent prices will go and that is up," he said.

The company traditionally carried out rent reviews two or three times a year but would now need to look at rents on a monthly basis.

"If we do get the opportunity to re-rent one of our managed properties, I think it's just about a forgone conclusion that the rent will go up," said Mr Forsyth.

The latest figures from the website show median rent for a property in Rotorua rose 3 per cent to $282.50 this August compared to last.

- Additional reporting Kim Fulton