A young mother-of-two has revealed why she packed up her family and moved more than 1,000km away amid Australia’s rental crisis.
Nicola Varlamos, 28, lived on the Gold Coast for four years before her family moved to Ocean Grove, a popular surf town on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula.
The couple decided to make the move down south after they spent a month searching for a bigger home on the Gold Coast with little success.
Ms Varlamos said she was ‘shocked’ by how the demand for rentals had skyrocketed over the four years she had lived there.
‘They had become so high in demand and essentially I couldn’t find anything that I felt was worth what people were asking,’ she told Daily Mail Australia.
‘At the same time, all of the information and statistics were coming out about the rental situation and specifically the Gold Coast being one of the most expensive places to live in Australia because the supply just couldn’t keep up, so people were charging crazy amounts.’
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
Ms Varlamos, who is originally from Melbourne, decided to look elsewhere and found a three-bedroom home 1,800km away in Ocean Grove for $600-a-week.
She estimated that a similar property in the Gold Coast would cost around $1,000 – even if the home 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 that she had friends in their mid-30s who resented having to pay a ‘huge chunk’ of their income on rent.
‘I felt like it’s going to set us back so many years if we’re just paying all of our money on rent. We’re expecting a second baby and I just thought, we could pay those prices, but we also want to buy our own property,’ she said.
‘It felt unsettling, it felt unethical, to pay such a high amount of money for very average places, you couldn’t get a garden and a big home with multiple bedrooms for under $1,000 in the areas that we were interested in.’
The mother-of-two said she doesn’t feel like a victim of the rental crisis
Ms Varmalos is now paying half as much rent in Victoria than she was on the Gold Coast
Before Ms Varlamos fell 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, an entertaining area. We have a proper home that we can grow into,’ she said.
‘It is a huge difference. You feel a lot more at peace.
‘You’re going to be paying rent every single week. You don’t want to be resenting your landlord or resenting having to pay so much money for a house.
‘I don’t want to be in that mentality when I’m paying rent – you should feel as if 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,’ she 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.’
