Energy woes in rental throes
Trying to find time to think about energy things while moving house
Firstly, we hit 500 subscribers. This is the first time either Alex or I have operated the No. 1 NEM focused Substack, so we don’t really know if that’s a good number or not. But we did want to say, thank you very much for reading along. It means a lot to both of us that you’re willing to lend us some of your time. We’re gonna keep the hits coming so gather your friends and watch your inbox.
My partner and I are in the throes of looking for our next place to live and its not much fun. We’re moving from Goonellabah to the Central Coast (about 660km) and are in that horrible limbo of knowing exactly when our current lease is ending and not having any idea when we’ll be able to sign a lease for a place to move into.
We are extremely fortunate as prospective renters. We have two incomes and no kids or pets, so we look good to real estate agents. We also have wonderful friends who can help us inspect from afar and offer us a place to crash if we can’t find a place.
Most renters don’t have our luck. Based on what we’ve seen on the Central Coast, a lot of the vacancies come about because landlords are raising rents and pushing out single parents and pensioners who can’t keep up.
Keeping in mind our privileged position, a smaller issue has been nagging away at me throughout this process. How and when are we meant to care about energy in amongst all of this?
Daydreaming about my future home
We’ve known we’d have to move for a while now. About six months ago, I did think about all the things it would be nice to have in a new place. I mostly work from home, and although the office I have set up here is beautiful, it’s a little exposed to the elements. It gets very toasty in the humid Lismore summer days and nippy on the milder Lismore winters.
So, in a new place, it’d be great to get a house with decent insulation and a passive solar design - catch some sun in winter and let us block it out over summer.
Is it possible to get solar? I’m assuming it’s rare - lots of rentals are apartments and most landlords with houses that have been long term rentals haven’t really had the reason to go and install solar. Still, there’d have to be some places where the owner installed solar and then moved out? Or it had solar and was sold to someone buying an investment property?
I’d also love to get a place that’s not connected to the gas network.1 My parents have an induction cooktop and it’s bloody wonderful. There’s a decent chance most of the gas-cooking diehards would be converted after a couple of goes on an induction stove (unless they’ve been dragged into the culture wars and gone and stuck “I <3 fossil fuels” on the back of their car.) We’ve written in the past about gas stove culture war flare ups in the US.
I figured it would be unlikely to find anything with an induction cooktop built into the kitchen but I’ve had resistive electric cooktops in my past two rentals. As long as I’m not subsidising gas utilities inane plans to blend an expensive dribble of hydrogen into the network, I’ll be happy!
We’re also considering buying a second vehicle. We’d like to hold out and see if we can get an electric car (failing that, an electric bike). So, ideally, we’d like to get a place with an enclosed garage where we’d have access to a power point to be able to charge up future car.
Beyond that, there are a bunch of other questions that popped into my head. Does it have a smart meter? What kind of lighting will there be? Is there heating/cooling? How well sealed is the house? What kind of hot water is it? Is it in an embedded network?
What happens when you start looking/ Domain vs. Realestate.com might be a front in the culture wars?
It’s apparent pretty quickly when you start looking that most of what I had hoped for wasn’t an option.
This is by no means scientific,2 but “induction” only had 208 rental hits on Domain and 701 on Realestate.com when I searched Australia-wide (noting that’s there’s likely a lot of overlap between these numbers). This includes a cute little cottage with induction cooking and gas heaters. Go figure. Running through the other possible features:
“Solar” had 1,040 hits on Domain, 1,923 on Realestate.com.
“Charger” had 6 hits on Domain, 52 on Realestate.com.
“Heat pump” had 282 hits on Realestate.com.
“Embedded network” had 327 hits on Realestate.com
“Smart meter” had two hits.
This was out of the 52,950 properties listed on Realestate.com and the 41,709 listed on Domain. I don’t know what I was expecting and I don’t know what this means. The number of solar households was maybe lower than I expected, given there’s 3.3 million homes with solar in Australia. On the other hand, I didn’t expect any hits on heat pump. For comparison, “gas” has over 17,000 hits.
Places with things like solar also describe it in strange or misleading ways. For example, this listing suggested solar contributes to energy efficiency.
Rental properties are likely to lag behind owner-occupied houses for the energy-related retrofits. There’s limited incentives to improve the energy efficiency of a rental as a lord of the land. Additionally, real estate agents might think these are not drawcards for rentals.
Curiously, while I was compiling my research, I noticed a bit of a difference between the two largest property listing sites: Domain and Realestate.com. The filter on Domain places a lot of emphasis on gas. When you filter rental properties for features, “gas” is higher on the list than an internal laundry. On the flip side, Realestate.com places much more emphasis on the kinds of features that someone more energy conscious might prefer.
The superiority of gas-cooking is a view many Australians seem to take. And to be fair, it’s better to cook with than resistive cooktops. But isn’t it also nice only having one utility bill?
One reason that might explain the emphasis on gas on Domain is their partnership with a collection of energy providers.3 If you’re moving into a place with gas, that will mean you’ll need to set up accounts for electricity, internet and gas. This has gotta mean more referral and commission opportunities for Domain. In truth, I have no idea if Domain is actually encouraging people to think gas is a “feature” not a bug. It might just be our undying love of indoor fumes.
On Realestate.com, they do seem to think people are interested in filtering properties based on energy related conditions. Some are vague though - I filtered for “High energy efficiency” and found 41 rentals across the country. They included an apartment in a super modern, “carbon neutral complex”, a place that won the HIA Greensmart award for efficient design, and an apartment in Canberra that has new appliances.
Realestate.com have even published articles promoting the use of GreenPower over carbon neutral energy plans. Truly a real-estate-listing-aggregator after my own heart!
Imagine my shock when I did some very light research and realised Realestate.com is majority owned by News Corp and Domain is majority owned by Fairfax. Is this the work of some Realestate.com double agent intern? They’ve decided to fight back, vote teal and allow renters to filter to solar hot water. If Rupert found out, it might tip him over the edge! I might add that to my daydream.
Anyway, my preliminary research suggested what I has assumed to be true - the odds of finding the rental of my daydreams was unlikely.
Then about four months pass. In that time, the dread slowly builds and every nice looking rental listing we look at in the Central Coast comes and goes. And suddenly it’s now.
A rude, realistic awakening
Of course, moving never pans out like you hope it will. Despite my well thought out daydreams, I’m suddenly in this claustrophobic window where we need to find a place in the next few weeks, organise movers, clean up and ship out.
Pretty quickly, our preferences are whittled down to some pretty simple questions. Is it big enough, cheap enough and in a good enough location? We’re juggling online inspections, asking friends to inspect for us and seeing apartments being listed and either leased right away, or left up for suspiciously long.
Am I going to turn down a good enough place because it’s got heaps of west-facing windows? Or poor insulation? Or a big gas kitchen? If you asked me a few months ago I would probably have said we might. Right now, if it ticks the other boxes? No way.
I’m left wondering how you’re meant to care about these things as a renter? I’m passionate enough about these topics to write a blog about them. I also have free time enough to write about them in a blog. And yet, energy related things are either hard to assess (e.g. how hot or cold does it get, airtightness), or aren’t high priorities compared to price, location, size, privacy etc. At this point, it feels like the best option is to just take a bit of a punt, rely on a gut feeling and hope you get a good real estate agent that doesn’t drag you into a shit fight to fix anything that’s broken? Yeesh.
Some solutions
My whinging aside, this is a legitimate problem. On a surface level, it’s so hard to understand and weight the thermal comfort and energy productivity of a house before you move in. Your choices are limited and you might not get the chance to really know how hot or cold a house will get, or expensive it will be to keep the temperature in an acceptable range.
On a more serious level, it’s dangerous. It might surprise, but Australia has more cold-related deaths than heat-related. Cold plays a role in 7% of the deaths in Australia (it’s 0.5% for heat), which is double the rate in Sweden.
Is this something readily fixed by markets? I don’t think so. Improving a house is the landlord’s responsibility and a research paper out of Monash University found landlords aren’t typically motivated to retrofit a home for increased rent (or for environmental reasons). Instead, most retrofits were motivated by grants and by tenant requests.
If markets aren’t the answer, it calls for regulation. There are increased standards for new build homes. The existing rental stock is much trickier. One solution would be setting minimum standards for rental properties, requiring the thermal standards of rentals to be higher. This could be through carrots or sticks. And it is being done - the ACT now requires all rentals have a minimum level of ceiling insulation by 2026. This could be extended to other states, wall insulation, airtightness, ventilation etc. Victoria requires homes to have fixed heaters that meet a minimum level of efficiency.
For me, I would like there to be a requirement for rental listings to disclose their energy performance. A simplified metric, like a star rating, would hopefully give renters tools to avoid the worst properties, shoot for the better ones and put some pressure on landlords to improve energy performance.
Moving on
About 1/3 of households are renters. Even from our privileged position, looking for a rental is a great first-hand experience of how easily renters can be left behind in the energy transition.
When we find a place, move in and reset the loop, I’ll get to return to my daydreams. Next time, I’ll dream of higher minimum standards for rentals and an evolution of housing that sees EV charging, induction cooking and solar closer to the default.
Things happen
In a major blow to major blowhards, NuScale Power has terminated a small-modular reactor project in Utah. Ballooning costs are a feature of nuclear projects globally, and have acted as a counterweight to the enthusiastic embrace the technology has received from the nuke bros Peter Dutton and Barnaby Joyce.
Speaking of Barnaby, his famously consistent moral stance on things continues. He is now concerned about the impact of offshore wind turbines on whales. This is yet another cautionary tale about how easy it is to stoke climate and culture wars. I’m just not sure if Barnaby knows that we don’t farm whales anymore?
The nationwide Optus outage on Wednesday 8 November severely affected the Evie network of public EV chargers, as well as a handful of Chargefox chargers (as well as lots of other businesses relying on the network). It seems that the other public charger networks were largely unaffected. A timely reminder that effective DER control needs redundancy and resilience planning.
We have a LinkedIn page. If you’re on LinkedIn, you might as well give us a follow.
An apartment I rented in Sydney had gas just for the hot water. Because gas meter reads were annual, they needed to estimate how much we were using. A large, unnamed, vertically-integrated utility pulled their finest minds together to estimate how much gas two people used in six weeks and arrived at $3,000. When I pointed out this was absurd, they apologised and promptly tried to direct debit it. Not happy Jan.
Alex is the numbers guy.
You really get peppered with electricity, gas and internet utilities when you’re trying to find a rental. If it’s not through the aggregator websites, some of the application forms force you to agree to a utilities company contacting you to be able to submit the application. Ridiculous.
Of our 7.5 years of stint in Australia, we’ve been (un)fortunate to sample 6 different rental properties. 5 in the upper north shore of Sydney, 1 (so far) in Adelaide. 5 out of 6 were new builds, as in, we were the first renters - nobody else lived there before.
In terms of energy efficiency, the new builds were not at all different from the single older one. All of them had gas for cooking and got water, and all of them had shit insulation and single glazed windows. I daresay it would be much-much easier to find a rental with a solar array on top (especially in South Australia) than one that provides for the best and cheapest way to save energy. You know, the kWh that you don’t consume.
Timely upgrades to rental property stock has been, and remains, a multi-generational problem. In Australia it’s been particularly exacerbated by the negative gearing mechanism, wherein a landlord can own an unprofitable investment property (e.g. rent income doesn’t cover mortgage & expenses) and claim the loss as a tax deduction). Thus, all other things being equal, such landlords literally have less spare cash available to fund upgrades, be they energy-efficiency related nor anything else. Negative Gearing began in the 80s as a way for Boomers (a massive demographic dwarfing all others & threatening to bankrupt developed nation governments with old-age pensions & health care costs) to start saving for their retirements, as they hadn’t had the benefit of decades of Superannuation savings, a scheme also begun in the 80s. NG has since become the 3rd rail of Australian politics: now that the Boomers have all retired, woe betide any government who tries to take away what’s effectively become middle-class welfare for Gen-Xers & even for wealthier Gen-Yers. Sorry to fellow comment-readers if all that sounds like Generation culture wars, but tell me it ‘ain’t true…
So you’re absolutely right, with that backdrop, and an utter lack of any incentives for landlords (further evidence of the great disappointment in Labor’s lacklustre energy & environmental plans), renters become the long-tail of poor energy performance in the domestic housing category. These things need to be chipped away at consistently over many years to make progress, the kind of thing you mention in the ACT, but which needs to be writ large. Don’t hold your breath…