Alecia
Different ways of paying for where you live.
Hello, my name is Alecia, and I am from the Housing Hub team here at the Summer Foundation. This chapter is about different types of rental properties. First, you need to make a key decision-will you rent or will you buy? Buying a property is a big financial decision, and we will cover this in another chapter. You should get good financial advice about your situation if you want to buy a property.
We will focus on rentals in this video. There are a number of different types of rental properties. Social housing means public housing and community housing. Public housing is provided and managed by state governments. Community housing is managed by not-for-profit community housing providers. Social housing means you pay for an affordable rent and you have security of tenure; this means you can stay as long as you want, as long as you have an ongoing housing need and follow the rules as a tenant. But there can be a long wait for public and community housing, up to several years. Some social housing is built with accessible features. You can apply for social housing through your state government. Affordable rental homes is another rental option. They have cheaper rents than private rental, but social housing is cheaper than affordable rental homes. The rent for an affordable home is usually around 3/4 of market rent. NRAS', the National Rental Affordability Schemes, homes are affordable rental homes. These are usually owned by landlords who get incentives to rent their homes to eligible people at an affordable rate. Some NRAS homes are built to accessibility standards. Some community housing providers have both social housing and affordable housing options, so they may manage NRAS properties. You can find and apply for affordable housing by [inaudible 00:02:04] community housing providers, or by using the Housing Hub.
The private rental market has the most housing available at any time, but most available private rental housing is not affordable now for people on low incomes. In the private rental market, you would generally work through a real estate agent or a property manager to enter into a lease. You usually have to pay bond up-front. Some state governments offer support with rental bonds. To apply for private rental, you can use the Housing Hub-the website address is housinghub.org.au.-or mainstream platforms, such as realestate.com.au or domain.com.au. Very few properties have accessible features for people with disability.
The Housing Hub has been created to help you find properties with the accessible features you need. The NDIS will pay for housing for a very small number of NDIS participants with very high support needs or an extreme functional impairment. This type of housing is called specialist disability accommodation, or SDA, and is covered in the next chapter. Now you can watch a story from Belinda about her experience living in private rental. Next, join Penny for the chapter about Specialist Disability Accommodation.
Back to Chapter 4 – Different ways of paying for where you live