Melbourne’s outer east has the tightest rental market of all of Australia, PropTrack reveals.

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Tenants in Melbourne’s outer east are facing the toughest search to find a rental property in the country.

New PropTrack research revealed the city’s areas including Whitehorse, Knox, Yarra Ranges, Maroondah and Manningham municipalities had just a 0.48 per cent rental vacancy rate in March.

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PropTrack senior economist Anne Flaherty said the strong demand from tenants wanting to live there was likely due to its great connectivity into the CBD, many employment opportunities and good schools.

“The outer eastern suburbs have seen the strongest price growth over the past 12 months,” Ms Flaherty said.

“It ticks the boxes in terms of what a lot of people are looking for when it comes to where to live.”

Melbourne’s inner-city areas experienced vacancy rate increases, which Ms Flaherty said was because those areas had a higher delivery of new dwellings.

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It one of just two properties in Monbulk for rent listed on realestate.com.au as of April 8.

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McGrath Croydon principal Paul Fenech said his agency, which covered most of Maroondah council, currently had just two homes available for lease, when a year ago he would probably have around 10 to 15.

He added that most of their rental property prices had increase by 10 to 20 per cent to cover for changes to land taxes and compliance checks over the last six to 12 months.

Extrapolated against the latest Census data’s 624,671 estimate of homes in the Victorian rental market, the 1.13 per cent statewide vacancy rate indicates just 7059 homes would have been available to tenants in the past month — an increase of 312 rentals from February.

Melbourne also remained significantly low at 1.12 per cent in March, but increased marginally by 0.05 percentage points from February.

Ms Flaherty said the biggest problem in the state’s rental market was that there simply wasn’t enough homes to house the growing population, especially at the rate it has been rising in the past two years.

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data shows the nation’s population grew by 659,800 people in the 12 months to September 2023.

And Victoria’s population increased more than any other state by 192,700.

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This three-bedroom house is available to rent from 10 May.

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She added that the bulk of population growth was driven by overseas migration.

“When people first come to Australia, for the first five years, they’re more likely to be renters than owner occupiers; that places an instant increase in demand for rental properties,” Ms Flaherty said.

“The speed at which we’re building new homes isn’t keeping up with population growth.”

Tenants Victoria director of community engagement Farah Farouque said leasing a home remained a tough proposition for Melbourne renters everywhere.

“All types of households are being hard hit; this is not an inner Melbourne challenge or limited to people on very low incomes,” Ms Farouque said.

“We’ve seen that renters in the suburbs are struggling even in the areas that they might have once turned to in order to find a more affordable home.

“There is a crisis of rental housing supply and a crisis of affordability with prices surging in a very tight market; no Melbourne suburb seems immune right now from the rental crisis.”

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