Monday night’s Four Corners investigation, “Unaffordable”, landed a hard truth on Australia’s housing sector: many listings marketed as Affordable‚ simply are not for the people who need them most. After eight weeks analysing rental listings across NSW and Victoria, the program found rents pegged at a discount to market rate can still be well out of reach for low-income renters, because market rent itself has become the problem.
It’s an important and overdue story. But it’s not the whole story, and we think that matters, because the tools to fix a meaningful part of this already exist, and community housing providers are already using them.
The gap the story exposes
Most of the “affordable” housing models scrutinised by Four Corners set rent as a discount off market rent, commonly landing somewhere around 74.9% of market value. The logic makes sense on paper: a below-market rent is still a below-market rent. But when the reference point, market rent, is itself overheated, a discount off an inflated number is still an inflated number. That’s the core failure the investigation surfaces, and it’s a fair criticism of a market-rent-anchored approach.
But community housing providers (CHPs) aren’t locked into that anchor. Registered CHPs can set rents below 74.9% of market rent. Doing so means absorbing a larger gap relative to market value, but that’s a policy and funding decision, not a structural limit, and it’s one more providers should feel confident making where their mission calls for it.
The model that sidesteps the problem entirely
The more durable answer is income-based rent-setting. Under this model, rent is calculated as a percentage of a tenant’s reported income, typically between 26% and 30%, rather than as a discount off a moving and currently distorted market benchmark. Structured this way, affordability isn’t an aspiration set by a formula against market rates; it’s a direct function of what a tenant actually earns. As market rents climb, income-based rents don’t inherit that distortion.
This is where Basix Housing Manager (BHM) already does meaningful work for our community housing customers:
- Accurate income data, not estimates. BHM integrates directly with Centrelink to pull verified income information, rather than relying on stale or self-reported figures that can push a tenant’s rent past what they can afford.
- Calculation that matches the framework. For providers operating under income-based models, BHM integrates with Queensland’s community housing rent calculator, so rent is set correctly against the relevant scheme from the outset, not adjusted after the fact.
- A flag before it becomes a crisis. For tenants on fixed or market-referenced rent programs, BHM monitors reported income against rent and flags cases where a tenant is paying more than 30% of income in rent, the standard threshold for rental stress, so providers can act before it compounds.
This won’t fix the broader rental market. It doesn’t build more housing, and it doesn’t cool prices that have run well ahead of wages. The Four Corners investigation is right: the system-level problem is real and requires a system-level answer.
But at the level of individual tenancies, the tools to keep community housing genuinely affordable already exist. Income-based rent-setting, backed by accurate income data and active affordability monitoring, keeps rent tied to what people can pay rather than to a market that’s lost the plot.
That’s not a small thing for the tenants living it, and it’s the part of this story we think is worth telling too.
Basix Housing Manager is built for community housing providers who want rent-setting, compliance, and tenancy management that reflects the realities their tenants face. Get in touch with EMS Solutions to see how BHM supports affordability in practice.