Over the past few years, long queue videos of rental real estate have become a regular feature of property reports.

Landlords raise their rent by double digits. Before last weekend's election, the Greens worked hard to run for rent freezes to prevent the "unlimited rent increase" they claimed that the main parties were supported by default.

There are horrible stories about single parents struggling to find affordable homes and lack of housing plague in catastrophic towns like Lismore.

However, the rental crisis is not what you think.

This is because for the vast majority of rented families, this is not a crisis at all.

Ben Phillips, associate professor at the Australian National University Center for Social Research and Methods, said it was "exaggeration" to talk about the national rental crisis.

According to real estate research firm CoreLogic, most of the media's attention has focused on the rapid rise in advertising rents, which peaked at more than 15% in 2024.

According to this data, this is the data that extends for about twenty years.

This rental measure has climbed nearly 50% since the end of 2019.

But Phillips, a member of the Albany government’s economic inclusion advisory committee, advocated a significant increase in job seekers’ payments, saying the rents for these online publicity are only a small and unrepresentative share of the total rental market.

They reflect how difficult and expensive it is to move rent or rent for the first time. What they don't reflect is that in fact about 3 million households are actually paying for how much.

There, the pictures are very different.

The most comprehensive database of rent paid is produced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics as part of its Consumer Price Index (or CPI, which measures inflation) series.

ABS tracks rents for about 600,000 properties, or one-third of rental homes per month.

With this measure, rents have climbed 19% in just five years, or less than half of the reported rate.

This is not nothing, but it increases by two percentage points overall from the CPI during the same period. In other words, rent has been a drag on overall inflation.

Michael Fotheringham, managing director of the Australian Institute of Housing and Urban Studies, said Phillips' analysis was correct.

Fotheringham said Corelogic's rental data "shows a more inflamed market than the ABS data, because a large percentage of renters are in a stable state."

"They have been on the property for over a year and have a landlord who doesn't want to rent as much as possible," he said.

On the other hand, there are also some renters who struggle to find property when the national vacancy rate is at a record low of 1% (which has been going on to 1% over the past two years), with a typical rate of 2.5%.

“They are all right (two sets of data), but they are talking about different things.”

That is, Fotheringham said there are “basic problems” in the word “crisis”.

He said problems in the housing market did not suddenly appear, such as natural disasters, and emergency response is not the solution to housing market problems.

"We have a severely broken housing system that we've been sleepwalking for 40 years. We need long, slow, multifaceted procedures. It took decades for us to get us into trouble and not fix it after Christmas."

In an unpublished research paper Australia’s rental cost trends, Phillips said the confusion about how much rent is boiled down to the difference between the “inventory” of real estate and the “traffic” of “real estate”.

“Economists often use bathtub analogies to make this difference,” he wrote.

“A small flow Hot water (new rental data) has little to no effect on colder, larger in stock Water in the bathroom (all rents on the market). ”

The average can hide multiple sins, but Phillips said the Albany government has fueled rental assistance and parenting payments, which helps mitigate the impact of higher rents on low-income households.

“Some people are struggling, but discussions about the general rental crisis are exaggerated,” he said.

Phillips' analysis shows that rent affordability has actually increased over the past decade, with renters earning faster than rents.

Despite recent increases, he estimates that the cost of renting as a share of the income of a renter has dropped from 28% in 2013 to 26% now.

Similarly, according to the latest Hilda survey, in 2023, one in five rental adults reported at least three forms of financial stress – a threshold for severe stress.

That's a lot, but that's not much changed from the 2021 low, and it's roughly the same as the 15-year average.