The Minns Labor Government is investing $6.6 million to develop and deliver the nation’s first Portable Rental Bonds Scheme.

Currently tenants are faced with average moving costs of $4,000 and the prospect of having to pay a new bond before their old one is returned.

The scheme will allow eligible renters to digitally transfer their bond from their existing rental property to their new rental home.

The scheme will make life easier for individuals, but will it have an overall impact on the tenancy market?

As a concept it seems like a great idea. Moving house is a painful experience at the best of times. It’s inconvenient, it’s disruptive, and it can be hugely expensive.

I saw a stat the other day that said the average cost is around four thousand dollars and the bond is obviously one of the biggest contributors to that.

Four weeks rent is not a small amount of money and when you’re effectively having to stump it up twice,  putting up the bond before you receive the bond back from the last place – that can be a serious challenge, particularly for people on low incomes.

I think it’s unlikely to make a huge difference to the housing crisis per se but it will certainly ease the cash flow pressures on people who are in the thick of it.

In making the announcement yesterday, the minister said that the government must explore every option to alleviate the financial pressures that renters face when moving house, are there other barriers within housing that are obvious quick fixes for government?

We talk all the time about a low supply of housing. We’re simply not building enough houses and it’s difficult to see that changing in the near future.

The changes to the tenancy laws are a welcome development but unfortunately, there are no real quick fixes.

These little pieces around the edges are helpful and are worth doing. But the fundamental issue is that we don’t have enough, particularly social and affordable housing. And housing stock more broadly is growing at a rate that is not keeping up with the rate of growth in the population.

There are a range of reasons for that. Obviously, the population growth is happening very rapidly at the moment and the supply of dwellings is not.

You’ve got higher input costs in the form of high interest rates, higher materials costs, higher labour costs and all of that’s feeding into meaning the properties just aren’t being delivered at the rate that they really need to be.

There are potentially other changes that could be made around things like placing further restrictions on short term, letting platforms, Airbnb and the likes to try and encourage some of that supply to flow back into the long term rental market rather than  being held off-market for the use of holiday makers.

But the fundamental issue is that we need to be significantly increasing the supply of social and affordable housing.

One of the mechanisms to increase housing supply is Build-to-Rent where big corporations, including our superannuation funds, build apartment towers and keep them longer term rather than sort of turning over the stock and profiting from the capital gain of them. Has there been much movement in that space?

The Build to Rent market faces the same challenges as the Build to Sell market, which is that the input costs have increased, which means delivering the product at a point where investors are going to get their return is increasingly challenging.

Most housing in Australia is built with the intention of selling it off the plan, almost all apartment style housing is built with the intention of selling it off the plan.

It’s quite unusual in Australia, although it happens overseas a little bit more, for large scale investors to build an entire apartment complex and then retain it long term as a revenue generating asset as opposed to one that’s sold off piecemeal for the immediate gain.

If you’re relying on rental income, you have the same problem as if you’re trying to sell it. At the end of the day, the investor needs to get paid back and whether that payback is coming through rental income or through sales, if your up-front construction costs are escalating quite rapidly, the challenge is the same in either case.

So there are no quick fixes but at least something’s being done?

This thinking outside the box is good and we need to see more of it.

I know that the New South Wales government is trialling modular social home construction in a couple of places around the state. If we can build social housing homes to an appropriate standard and there’s a saving in terms of time or money in the way that they can be delivered, then that’s potentially something that can be expanded and might help ease the crisis as well.

All options need to be on the table and it is good to see people thinking outside the box.