Understanding the Share Housing Sector: A Geography of Group Housing Supply in Metropolitan Sydney

ABSTRACT

Within the wider affordability crisis affecting major cities throughout the world, share housing has become increasingly important, potentially expanding capacity in the private rental sector. But share housing is difficult to monitor and research, embedded in various forms of tenancy and household arrangements within the wider housing system. Online rental platforms which increasingly enable and facilitate the share housing sector may also offer a critical window into its operation. This paper examines this possibility with reference to Sydney, Australia, drawing on listings scraped from share housing platform “Flatmates.com.au” to determine the scale and distribution of shared housing vacancies relative to the city’s wider housing market. Our findings demonstrate rising dependence on share housing as a source of lower-cost rental supply near employment and education but raise questions about share accommodation as a long-term housing solution.

摘要

住房危机是全球主要城市的通病。在此背景下，共享住房因为可以潜在地扩大私人租房市场的容量而变得越来越重要。然而，共享住房藏身于各种类型的租赁和家庭结构中，因此很难被监测和研究。网上租赁平台越来越多地支持和促进了共享住房的发展，同时也为观察共享住房市场提供了一个重要的窗口。本文以澳大利亚悉尼为例，通过借鉴共享住房平台flatmates.com.au上的信息，对上述可能性进行了研究。我们的研究确定了共享住房在大市场背景下的规模和分布。研究结果显示，越来越多的人将共享住房作为在就业和教育中心附近的低成本租房来源。本研究也对共享住房作为一种长期住房解决方案提出了质疑。

KEYWORDS:

• Share housing
• online real estate platforms
• rental affordability
• housing choice
• informal housing

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. We compared our automatic data extraction via web scraping which automatically organises textual data into categories that we have preassigned (e.g. around location, rent, accommodation type) with a manual review of the complete advertisements, for data checking; we also assessed the data output for duplicated records, which were removed.

2. Since group household density and density change maps show a wider data spectrum than that of Flatmates maps, deeper colours (dark blue and dark purple) are used in the group household maps to reflect the differences, i.e. the largest and smallest number categories.

3. People who earn more than 50% but less than 80% of the NSW or Sydney median income are classified as low-income earners; less than 50% are very low-income earners (NSW Government 2019). Housing costs exceeding 30% of income are regarded unaffordable. Therefore, in this study, the affordable rental threshold for low-income earners = median weekly personal income (Sydney May 2018) *80%*30%; while the affordable rental threshold for very low-income earners = median weekly personal income (Sydney May 2018) *50%*30%.