Well, most people see tiny homes
as a holiday home.
This is not a holiday for me.
I'm homeless.
It would seemed more affordable
for us to build our own tiny home
than continue renting.
If you go and live in that
and there's a bushfire
and it's going to catch fire
and go up very quickly.
With soaring rental and housing prices
across the country, people are looking for
cheaper alternatives.
I've come to Queensland
to meet two people who've been priced
out of the market and have now found their
own solution.
Hello, Rochelle.
Hi, nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you too.
Thank you very much.
Oh, nice.
So how big is this place?
It's 2.2 meters high, 2.2 meters wide
and the length is 4.2 meters.
It's very compact.
You’ve gotta be good with
your space management.
Yeah, every surface counts.
There's always extra effort
that you have to do to live in a tiny house
because things have got to be moved in order
to make things functional.
And that is the bed made.
Cause I don't have a toilet here yet.
My landlady's being very gracious
and given me a key so I can access
the toilet facilities in there.
I also pay for my share
of the electricity and water.
So here’s my sink and obviously
I keep my dishes separate because obviously
I need to wash my hands during the day
so all my dirty dishes go in there
and I just generally pop it away
so you can't see it.
And then that gives me extra bench space.
And when I want to cook dinner,
I can just put my electric stove up here.
Rochelle has been living
in a tiny house for nine months.
She and her daughter
were in a two bedroom unit
before the landlord sold it.
She needed to stay in the same area
so that her daughter's
final year of high school was not interrupted
by changing schools.
But the prices had increased substantially.
Pricing her out of the market.
It was the most stressful time of my life.
You know, I've got a daughter in grade 12.
I'm working full time.
I was pouring everything into trying
to find a home for us,
and there's just nothing.
At one point
I said to my daughter, ‘I'm so sorry,
but we're just going to have to put our energy
into the tiny house.’
The purchase price was $20,000.
I bought it off Gumtree.
Then I've put another $20,000 in it
to renovate it because I had to
completely gut it.
Rochelle has parked her tiny house
in her friend's backyard where she connects
to their power and water.
Tiny houses are caravan like houses built on
wheels or trailers so they can be towed
to different locations.
They're similar in size to a shipping container.
The whole house is only sixteen by eight feet.
Tiny houses started in the US 30 years ago
and are often promoted online as glamorous
ways to downsize and live outside cities.
Over the last 15 years in Australia,
they've grown in popularity
as weekend retreats on holiday rental sites.
This is where I had to pour all my money
because I know that this rental crisis
isn't going away anytime soon.
I'm not going to get back into the rental
market, let alone buy my own property.
The rental market is bleak across the country,
with just 1% of rental properties
available nationally.
That is the lowest rate since April 2006.
And the Brisbane market where Rochelle is
living is below the national rate,
with 0.7% of rental properties vacant.
In terms of affordable rentals,
that is rental properties
that cost less than $400 a week.
Brisbane is less affordable than Perth,
Adelaide and Melbourne,
with only 13%
of rental properties under $400.
And the Sunshine Coast
is even less affordable, with only 4.6%
of rental properties under $400.
Hi. Hello.
Welcome. Lovely.
Thank you.
How long have you been living here?
We have been here since mid August, so.
Yep, that's coming up to six months.
Angela and her sons, Seb and Milian we’re
in the same rental on the Sunshine Coast
for three and a half years before it was sold.
To find a place big enough
for all three of them.
Angela says she would have been paying
more than $500,
nearly double her previous rent.
A good half my wage
would have gone to rent.
A year ago, I'd explored the option
of a tiny house but wasn't able to
obtain finance at the time.
So when I looked at the prices of rentals,
I just thought,
‘What do I really
want to be doing?’
So I went back to that place
and we made it work.
Finance became available.
Angela then found a landowner willing to let
her set up her tiny house long term.
But her local council says
people who live in a tiny home
need to apply for a temporary home permit.
It costs $514 and lasts for 18 months.
I have decided not to get the
temporary home permit, mostly because
it's not a temporary home.
On this property we have,
I think, five dwellings
that aren't council approved.
A lot of tiny houses, caravans, buses
do get moved along from council.
We're sort of counting down the time
until we are also vacated from the land.
It feels very uncertain our future here.
It feels as though
we can't put our roots down.
Tiny homes are a great solution
to the housing crisis.
We've got people like myself
buying the homes.
My builder has a home
completed every week and
you’ve got landowners that are
willing to open up their land
and share with people.
But there's hesitancy because they're worried
about repercussions with council.
The Sunshine Coast Council declined an on
camera interview, but instead gave us
a written statement.
Town planning academic Paul Burton
has been researching tiny houses for six years
and says the number of people
living in them permanently is growing.
We reckon there's maybe a thousand or so
people live permanently
in tiny houses on wheels.
Paul believes tiny houses are one solution
to the housing crisis and wants
local councils to review laws
around temporary dwellings.
I think councils just need
to be more thoughtful
about how they want to regulate
tiny house living.
It may have been a policy that you devised
some years or decades ago or other
circumstances have changed.
You go, well, actually there's a housing crisis
and we'd like to make some land
available for somebody to come along
and put a cluster of tiny houses here.
Despite being an advocate for tiny houses,
Paul says they have their limitations.
We could make a tiny house out of wood.
It’d look lovely. It’d look beautiful.
But if you go and live in that in Gippsland
and there's a bushfire,
then you're sitting in something
that a few sparks and it's going to catch fire
and go up very quickly.
What happens if it gets flooded,
you know, or rain affected?
This is a problem that I've had
being a single mum for 16 years.
It's very hard for me to enter
back into the real estate market.
So this is something I don't see myself
moving out of any time soon.