A young mother of two has revealed why she packed up her family and moved more than 1,000 kilometers away amid Australia’s rental crisis.
Nicola Varlamos28, lived on the Gold Coast for four years before his family moved to Ocean Grove, a popular surf town on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula.
The couple decided to move south after spending a month looking for a larger home on the Gold Coast without much success.
Varlamos said she was “shocked” by how demand for rentals had skyrocketed during the four years she had lived there.
“They had been in so much demand that I essentially couldn’t find anything worth what people were asking for,” he told Daily Mail Australia.
“At the same time, all the information and statistics were coming out about the rental situation and specifically that the Gold Coast was one of the most expensive places to live in Australia because supply simply couldn’t keep up, so people were charging crazy quantities.”
Nicola Varlamos, 28, moved from the Gold Coast to Ocean Grove in Victoria
Ms Varmalos is pictured with her four-year-old daughter and her fiancé.
Varlamos, originally from Melbourne, decided to look elsewhere and found a three-bedroom house 1,800 kilometers away, in Ocean Grove, for $600 a week.
She estimated a similar property on the Gold Coast would cost around $1,000, even if the house was a 30-minute drive from the beach.
The mother-of-two said while her family could have afforded to stay in Queensland, they wanted to get their money’s worth, adding she had friends in their 30s who resented having to pay a “big chunk” of their income on rent.
‘I felt it would set us back many years if we paid all our money in rent. “We’re expecting a second baby and I thought we could afford those prices, but we also want to buy our own property,” he said.
“It felt unsettling, unethical, paying such a high amount of money for very average places, you couldn’t get a garden and a big house with multiple bedrooms for less than $1,000 in the areas we were interested in.”
The mother of two said she doesn’t feel like a victim of the rental crisis.
Varmalos now pays half the rent in Victoria than on the Gold Coast
Before Varlamos became pregnant with her second child, the family had lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the Gold Coast for $550 a week.
‘So for an extra $50 a week, we have three bedrooms, an office, a huge garden and an entertainment area. We have a suitable home in which we can grow.,’ she said.
‘It’s a huge difference. You feel much more at peace.
‘You’re going to pay the rent every week. You don’t want to resent your landlord or resent having to pay so much money for a house.
“I don’t want to have that mentality when I pay rent — you have to feel like you’re getting your money’s worth.”
The mother of two said she doesn’t feel like a victim of the rental crisis.
“We’ve only lived in one place as a family, which was the Gold Coast,” he said.
“And we’re young, this is the time to experiment and see if you like living somewhere else; you don’t have to stay forever.”
