Rooming House Investment Melbourne — Buyer's Agent's 2026 Guide

The short answer. In Victoria a building is a rooming house when one or more rooms are available for occupancy on payment of rent and the total number of people who may occupy those rooms is not less than four — Residential Tenancies Act 1997 s 3(1) counts people, not leases and not rooms. Running one triggers three separate obligations: a licence from the Business Licensing Authority under Rooming House Operators Act 2016 s 7(1) (operating without one carries up to 240 penalty units or 2 years imprisonment for an individual and 1,200 penalty units for a company — $50,184 and $250,920 at the $209.10 penalty unit fixed for the financial year from 1 July 2026); registration of the premises with the local council as prescribed accommodation under Public Health and Wellbeing Act 2008 s 67; and compliance with two sets of minimum standards, the Public Health and Wellbeing (Prescribed Accommodation) Regulations 2020 and the Residential Tenancies (Rooming House Standards) Regulations 2023. The two numbers that decide how many rooms a house can legally carry are a 7.5 m² minimum bedroom floor area (Prescribed Accommodation Regs reg 11(2)) and one toilet plus one bath or shower plus one wash basin for every 10 people or part thereof (reg 20) — not one bathroom per six residents, which is a widely repeated error. A planning permit is often not required, but Victoria Planning Provisions Clause 52.23 contains two separate exemptions with two different zone lists, and conflating them is the most common error in Victorian rooming house content. Clause 52.23-2 (use exemption, VC274, gazetted 28 February 2025) removes the permit requirement to use land for a rooming house in the Activity Centre, Capital City, Commercial 1, General Residential, Housing Choice and Transport, Mixed Use, Neighbourhood Residential, Precinct, Residential Growth and Township Zones — ten zones — where any condition opposite 'rooming house' in the zone's table of uses is met, the total floor area of all buildings on the land (measured from the outside of external walls or the centre of party walls) does not exceed 300 m² excluding outbuildings, no more than 12 persons are accommodated, and no more than 9 bedrooms are provided. Clause 52.23-3 (buildings and works exemption, VC257, gazetted 25 February 2025) removes the permit requirement to build in only six zones — General Residential, Housing Choice and Transport, Mixed Use, Neighbourhood Residential, Residential Growth and Township — where no more than 9 bedrooms are developed, bedrooms are accessible only from within the building, total floor area stays within the same 300 m² excluding outbuildings, minimum garden area is provided if the development is in the General Residential Zone or the Neighbourhood Residential Zone, and shared entry facilities and common areas including a kitchen and living area are provided. Note there is no resident cap in 52.23-3 — the 12-person limit is a condition of the use exemption only. An overlay can still require a permit, and a building permit is always required. Under the National Construction Code the building is Class 1b up to 300 m² and fewer than 12 residents; beyond that it becomes Class 3.

On the money side, across the 48 rooming house conversions inside PremiumRea's published 345-transaction open dataset (offer dates October 2023 to September 2025) the median gross yield after works was 6.94% and the median weekly rent $1,150, computed as annualised weekly rent divided by purchase price plus renovation cost, against a 5.77% median across all 345. Those are recorded historical outcomes for those specific properties, before the operating cost of running a licensed rooming house, and no result is promised on any future purchase. A compliant five-room conversion of a standard Melbourne house costs $80,000 to $150,000 in our experience, not the $30,000 to $50,000 quoted in marketing-led articles.

Sources last verified 31 August 2026, against the authorised Victorian legislation: Residential Tenancies Act 1997 (v113), Rooming House Operators Act 2016 (v009), Prescribed Accommodation Regulations 2020 (v005), Rooming House Standards Regulations 2023 (v002), Consumer Affairs Victoria — operator licensing, Consumer Affairs Victoria — rooming house minimum standards, NCC building classifications and VPP Clause 52.23. General information only, not legal advice — whether your specific arrangement is a rooming house turns on facts a web page cannot assess. Our fully referenced legal summary, with section numbers and the penalty table, is at Victorian rooming house rules.

Rooming house investment in Melbourne is one of the highest-yield residential strategies legally available — and one of the most regulatorily complex to execute. A standard 4-bedroom house in Brimbank or Whittlesea generating $550 per week as a single tenancy can, after compliant conversion to a rooming house with five rooms, generate $1,250 to $1,600 per week. The arithmetic is dramatic. So is the risk profile if the conversion is not done by the book.

I am Steven Jin, Chief Acquisitions Officer at PremiumRea. We have advised on rooming house acquisitions and conversions across Melbourne for the past several years and the strategy is now central to our high-yield client briefs. This article is the Melbourne buyers agent guide we use internally with clients before they commit to this strategy. It covers the Rooming House Operators Act 2016 (Vic) registration framework, the council classification distinction between Class 1b and Class 3 buildings, CFA (Country Fire Authority) fire-rating requirements, real conversion economics on an $800,000 property, council-by-council variation, and the risks that most marketing-led articles skip.

If you are searching 'rooming house Melbourne' for the first time, the headline yield numbers are real. They are also the easy part. Everything below the yield is harder than the marketing suggests.

What is a rooming house, legally, in Victoria

A 'rooming house' under Victorian law is defined in Residential Tenancies Act 1997 (Vic) s 3(1): a building, other than an SDA dwelling, with one or more rooms available for occupancy on payment of rent in which the total number of people who may occupy those rooms is not less than four. Read that carefully, because the most common and most expensive misreading of Victorian rooming house law is to count leases or bedrooms. The Act counts people. A three-bedroom house let to four people on three separate leases is a rooming house. Below four people the rooming house framework does not apply and an ordinary residential rental agreement governs the arrangement 1.

Four instruments work together, and they are constantly conflated:

1. Rooming House Operators Act 2016 (Vic) — the operator licence. Section 7(1) provides that a person other than a registered housing association or registered housing provider must not conduct the business of operating a rooming house without a licence. The licence is issued by the Business Licensing Authority, not by Consumer Affairs Victoria, and a rooming house manager engaged by the operator to do the day-to-day running does not need their own licence, though they must still be fit and proper. The maximum penalty is 240 penalty units or imprisonment for 2 years for a natural person and 1,200 penalty units for a body corporate. The Victorian penalty unit is $209.10 for the financial year commencing 1 July 2026, fixed by the Treasurer under the Monetary Units Act 2004 and published in Victoria Government Gazette No. S 234 on 5 May 2026, which makes those maxima approximately $50,184 and $250,920. Penalty units are re-indexed every 1 July, so check the current Gazette notice before relying on a dollar figure 2510.

2. Public Health and Wellbeing Act 2008 (Vic) s 67 — council registration of the premises. A rooming house is prescribed accommodation under regulation 6(f) of the Prescribed Accommodation Regulations 2020, which means the proprietor must register the premises, periodically, with the council in whose municipal district it sits. This is a different registration from the operator licence and it does not substitute for it 3.

3. Public Health and Wellbeing (Prescribed Accommodation) Regulations 2020 — space, density and facilities. Regulation 11(2) prohibits a room being used as a bedroom if its floor area is less than 7.5 square metres; reg 11(6) says the area includes built-in furniture and fixtures but excludes any bathroom or toilet in or attached to the bedroom. Regulation 20 sets the facilities ratio: at least one toilet, one bath or shower, and one wash basin for every 10 people or fraction of that number. An earlier version of this article said the ratio was one bathroom per six residents; that was wrong, and it has been corrected against the authorised Regulations. Regulation 21 requires a register of occupants, kept for at least 12 months after the last entry 3.

4. Residential Tenancies (Rooming House Standards) Regulations 2023 — rooms, facilities and safety. These commenced on 26 February 2023 and regulation 4 revokes the 2012 Regulations, so any guidance still citing the 2012 instrument is describing revoked law. They cover lockable doors, power outlets, window coverings and heating in each room; privacy latches on toilets and bathrooms; kitchen, dining and laundry facilities (reg 12: one oven and one four-burner cook top in a common area for every 12 or fewer residents who do not have one in their own room); and building-wide safety obligations including emergency plans, electrical and gas safety checks, ventilation and lighting 46.

Building classification, separately again. Under the National Construction Code a standalone house is Class 1a. A Class 1b building is a boarding house, guest house or hostel with a floor area less than 300 m² that ordinarily has fewer than 12 people living in it; a boarding or lodging house that does not meet those criteria is Class 3. Class 1a and 1b are building classifications answering a construction question — they are not a route around the licensing regime, and treating them as one is a category error 8.

Planning permit — often not required, but read the clause as two clauses. Victoria Planning Provisions Clause 52.23 is not one exemption. It is two, with different zone lists and different conditions, and treating it as a single five-zone rule is the error most Victorian rooming house content makes 9.

Clause 52.23-2 — use exemption (Amendment VC274, gazetted 28 February 2025). The requirement to obtain a permit to use land for a rooming house does not apply in the Activity Centre Zone, Capital City Zone, Commercial 1 Zone, General Residential Zone, Housing Choice and Transport Zone, Mixed Use Zone, Neighbourhood Residential Zone, Precinct Zone, Residential Growth Zone or Township Zone — ten zones — if all of the following are met: any condition opposite the use 'rooming house' in the zone's or schedule's table of uses is met; the total floor area of all buildings on the land, measured from the outside of external walls or the centre of party walls, does not exceed 300 square metres, excluding outbuildings; no more than 12 persons are accommodated; and no more than 9 bedrooms are provided.

Clause 52.23-3 — buildings and works exemption (Amendment VC257, gazetted 25 February 2025). The requirement to obtain a permit to construct a building or carry out works for a rooming house does not apply in the General Residential Zone, Housing Choice and Transport Zone, Mixed Use Zone, Neighbourhood Residential Zone, Residential Growth Zone or Township Zone — six zones, a narrower list than the use exemption — if all of the following are met: no more than 9 bedrooms are developed on the land; bedrooms can only be accessed from within the building; the total floor area of all buildings on the land, measured the same way, does not exceed 300 square metres, excluding outbuildings; if the development is in the General Residential Zone or the Neighbourhood Residential Zone, a garden area is provided in accordance with the minimum garden area requirement specified in the zone; and shared entry facilities and common areas, including a kitchen and living area, are provided. There is no resident cap in 52.23-3 — the 12-person limit belongs to the use exemption in 52.23-2.

Three practical consequences. The Housing Choice and Transport Zone is in both lists and is routinely omitted from summaries. The floor-area test is total floor area excluding outbuildings, not 'gross floor area' — a shed or detached garage does not count against your 300 m², which usually helps. And the garden area condition applies in the GRZ or NRZ, not the GRZ alone. An overlay on the title can still independently require a permit for buildings and works, and a building permit is always required, so a per-lot check remains step one.

The practical implication for an investor: converting a standard Class 1a house typically requires a building permit and, where the configuration crosses into Class 1b, reclassification plus the associated fire safety upgrade (interconnected hardwired smoke alarms with battery backup, fire-rated separation between rooms, and in some councils emergency lighting and fire-rated doors), council registration of the premises, and an operator licence before a single room is let.

August 2026 note: before underwriting any conversion, re-verify the current requirements rather than relying on an article date — operator registration, the rooming house minimum standards, and your target council's planning position each move on their own schedule. Our fully referenced summary — section numbers, both sets of regulations and the penalty table — is at our Victorian rooming house rules page, and the baseline standards that apply to every Victorian rental are covered in Victoria's rental minimum standards. On results: 48 of the 345 purchases in our published dataset were rooming house conversions, and that subset recorded a median gross yield after works of 6.94% with a median weekly rent of $1,150 (offer dates October 2023 to September 2025; yield = annualised weekly rent divided by purchase price plus renovation cost), against a 5.77% median across all 345 purchases — the anonymised transaction data is on our research page.

The 4-room minimum and why 5 rooms is the sweet spot

The rooming house economics work above 4 rented rooms. Below 4 rented rooms (3 or fewer), the asset typically does not justify the conversion costs and operating overhead. The sweet spot in our experience is a 5-room configuration in a property originally configured as a 4-bedroom house with a separate study or formal living that can be converted into the fifth room.

Why 5 rooms specifically:

• 4 rooms generates $1,000-$1,280 per week (4 x $250-$320). Net of the conversion CAPEX and operating costs, the marginal advantage over a single-tenancy is significant but not transformational.
• 5 rooms generates $1,250-$1,600 per week (5 x $250-$320). The extra room is typically the highest-margin room because conversion costs do not scale linearly — fire systems, kitchen, bathrooms are largely fixed costs, while each additional bedroom adds incremental revenue.
• 6 rooms generates $1,500-$1,920 per week. The statutory facilities minimum is one toilet, one bath or shower and one wash basin per 10 people, so a sixth room does not by itself force a second bathroom — but sharing one bathroom between six adults is a letting and retention problem rather than a compliance problem, and most of our clients add a second wet area anyway, which costs $20,000-$35,000.
• The hard ceilings are 12 residents and 300 m², not seven rooms. Beyond fewer than 12 residents or 300 m² of floor area the building leaves NCC Class 1b for Class 3, which brings commercial-grade fire safety and accessibility requirements; and beyond 12 residents or 9 bedrooms the Clause 52.23-2 use exemption falls away, so the use needs a permit under the zone. (The Clause 52.23-3 buildings and works exemption has no resident cap at all — its limits are 9 bedrooms and 300 m² of total floor area excluding outbuildings.) Conversion CAPEX past that point rises steeply and the asset is materially harder to finance through standard residential lenders. Most clients should stop well short of those thresholds unless they are professional rooming house operators.

A standard 4-bedroom suburban house in Brimbank or Whittlesea on a 600m² block with a separate study/family room is, in practice, the ideal candidate for a 5-room conversion. We do not generally recommend converting smaller 3-bedroom houses unless a structural extension is also being added.

Council variation — Brimbank and Whittlesea permissive, Boroondara and Stonnington effectively banned

This is the single most underdiscussed variable in the strategy. Local council classification of rooming houses, planning permit requirements, and enforcement appetite vary wildly across Melbourne.

Permissive councils (we actively buy here): Brimbank, Whittlesea, parts of Hume, parts of Casey, parts of Greater Dandenong, parts of Wyndham. These councils have established rooming house populations, clear permit pathways, and known fire safety upgrade contractor ecosystems. Conversion timelines are typically 4-7 months from settlement to first tenant, and the building permit process is well-trodden. Our portfolio experience suggests these councils approve conversions at high rates when the application is properly prepared.

Mixed councils (case-by-case): Maribyrnong, parts of Moreland (now Merri-bek), parts of Hobsons Bay, Darebin. These councils accept rooming houses but apply tighter scrutiny — neighbour notification often required, planning permits in some zones, and fire safety inspections may be more stringent.

Effectively banned councils: Boroondara, Stonnington, Bayside, parts of Glen Eira. These councils have planning schemes, neighbourhood character overlays, and Heritage Overlay coverage that make rooming house permits exceptionally difficult to obtain in residential zones. Some have specific local provisions or community consultation requirements that make most applications unviable in practice. We do not recommend rooming house conversions in these LGAs and have not pursued them.

The property pricing math also reflects this. A $800,000 budget buys an excellent rooming house candidate in Brimbank, Whittlesea, or Hume — 4 bedroom, 600m²+ block, 1980s-2000s brick construction, near a train station. The same budget in Boroondara or Stonnington buys a tiny weatherboard with no rooming house pathway. The yield arithmetic only works in the permissive councils.

"The yield arithmetic only survives contact with the council. An $800,000 house in Brimbank converts; the same money in Boroondara buys a weatherboard with no rooming house pathway at all." — Steven Jin, Chief Acquisitions Officer, PremiumRea

Conversion cost honesty — $80K-$150K, not $30K

Marketing-driven articles often quote conversion costs of $30,000-$50,000. In our experience these numbers are roughly half to a third of what a compliant conversion actually costs in 2024-2025.

Realistic budget for a 5-room compliant conversion of a standard 4-bedroom Brimbank or Whittlesea house, late 2024 pricing:

• Building permit and reclassification fees — $4,000-$8,000 depending on council and consultant.
• Fire safety system (interconnected smoke alarms, hardwired with battery backup, fire-rated wall and ceiling separation between rooms, fire-rated doors in some councils) — $25,000-$45,000.
• Conversion of study/family room into 5th bedroom (partition wall, door, electrical, lighting, window if not already compliant for natural light/ventilation under NCC) — $8,000-$18,000.
• Bathroom upgrade or second bathroom installation (if existing bathroom is too small or only 1 bathroom for 5 residents) — $15,000-$35,000.
• Kitchen reconfiguration (rooming house kitchens often need more storage capacity per resident, additional cooking facilities, sometimes lockable individual storage) — $5,000-$12,000.
• Electrical upgrade (additional lighting circuits, separately metered or sub-metered rooms in some configurations, RCD compliance throughout) — $4,000-$10,000.
• Egress and emergency lighting (some councils require visible exit signage and battery-backed emergency lighting in shared corridors) — $2,000-$6,000.
• Compliance certifier and final inspection — $2,500-$5,000.
• Furniture, fittings for resident rooms (most rooming house tenants expect furnished rooms — bed, mattress, wardrobe, desk per room) — $8,000-$15,000 across 5 rooms.
• Contingency 10-15 per cent — $8,000-$20,000.

Total realistic range: $80,000 to $150,000. Properties at the lower end are typically newer (2000s+) with better existing electrical infrastructure and more compliant room sizes. Properties at the upper end are 1960s-1970s stock that needs more substantial fire safety and compliance work.

Real numbers — $800K house, 5 rooms, $1,250-$1,600/week

Let's run the full math on a realistic deal we executed for a client in 2024.

Acquisition (Brimbank LGA, 2024):

• Purchase price: $810,000 (4-bedroom 1990s brick veneer, 620m², near train station)
• Stamp duty + conveyancing + initial inspection: ~$45,000
• Conversion CAPEX (5-room, all-in): $115,000
• Total deployed: $970,000

Pre-conversion (single tenancy):

• Weekly rent: $570 (market rate for the area, late 2024)
• Annual gross rent: $29,640
• Gross yield on $970K: 3.05 per cent

Post-conversion (5 rooms, all let):

• Per-room rent: $290/week average (range $260-$320 by room size and amenity)
• Total weekly rent (full occupancy): $1,450/week
• Annual gross rent (full occupancy, factor 95% occupancy assumption): $71,630
• Gross yield on $970K total deployment: 7.38 per cent

That is a 4.3 percentage point uplift in gross yield versus single tenancy on the same total capital — and the absolute weekly cash uplift is $880/week ($1,450 - $570).

Honest qualifiers:

• Operating costs are higher. Property management for rooming houses typically charges 8-12 per cent (vs 5-7 per cent for standard rentals), tenant turnover is higher, utilities are typically included in rent (water, gas, electricity, internet — adds $100-$200/week to operator cost), and minor repairs are more frequent.
• Vacancy risk is per-room, not all-or-nothing. A standard rental loses 100 per cent of income during a vacancy. A 5-room rooming house typically runs at 90-95 per cent occupancy, which means 1 of 5 rooms vacant at any given time is the operating norm. Net cash flow assumes 90-95 per cent occupancy.
• Net yield after operating costs and vacancy landed between 5.5 and 6.5 per cent of total deployed capital across the rooming house conversions we settled for clients between October 2023 and September 2025 (n = 48). That is a recorded historical range for those specific properties, not a projection for yours, and it is well below the 7.38 per cent gross headline on this single 2024 deal (n = 1).

As Joey Don, our co-founder, frames it: 'The rooming house strategy works on paper at 7 per cent gross yield. It works in practice at 5.5 to 6.5 per cent net, which is still better than nearly any single tenancy in Melbourne. The honest number is the second one.'

NRAS history (2008-2026 wind-down) — and why it matters now

Investors evaluating rooming house economics in 2026 sometimes encounter the NRAS (National Rental Affordability Scheme). NRAS was a federal program that ran from 2008 to 2026, providing approximately $11,000/year in tax credits per dwelling to investors who rented to eligible tenants at 20 per cent below market rent for a 10-year period. Some rooming house operators participated in NRAS to subsidise the below-market yield.

NRAS is now winding down — most NRAS participations expire between 2025 and 2026 as the original 10-year terms complete, and there is no successor scheme active. For investors entering rooming house investment in 2026, NRAS is not a planning consideration — the tax credit is no longer available for new entrants. Existing NRAS-tied rooming houses on resale will have a remaining NRAS term of 0-2 years, after which the property reverts to standard market-rate operation.

The broader point: do not factor NRAS-style subsidies into your rooming house yield model. The arithmetic must work on market rent alone.

The risks competitors don't mention

Tenant management. Rooming house tenancies are governed by Part 5 of the Residential Tenancies Act and the relationships are different from standard tenancies. Tenants are individuals (not households), turnover is higher (4-8 month average tenancy versus 12-18 months in single tenancies), and conflicts between residents (noise, kitchen sharing, cleanliness) consume operator time. Most clients eventually engage a specialist rooming house property manager (8-12 per cent fee) rather than self-manage. Self-management at scale is a part-time job.

Regulatory tightening. The Victorian government has tightened rooming house regulation progressively since the original 2010 amendments. Future tightening is plausible — minimum room size requirements may rise, fire safety standards may be upgraded, registration fees may increase. An investor must assume that a rooming house compliant in 2025 may need additional CAPEX in 2030-2035 to remain compliant. We model $20,000-$40,000 of decadal compliance reinvestment in our long-term yield projections.

Finance availability. Lending against a property that is already configured as a rooming house is materially harder than lending against standard residential. Lenders generally treat the asset as 'specialised use,' which in the deals we have seen means a loan-to-value ratio in the 60-70 per cent range rather than the 80-90 per cent available on a standard house, and a harder refinance later. Some lenders decline the asset class outright; others will write it with adjusted terms and a higher rate. Credit policy on specialised-use assets differs from lender to lender and changes without notice, so the only answer worth acting on is the current one your broker gets in writing before you commit. We introduce clients to independent brokers and take no referral fee from any of them; we are not licensed to give credit advice. Most of our clients structure the deal by purchasing the property as a standard Class 1a residential, financing it conventionally at 80 per cent LVR, completing the conversion, and then either holding the existing finance or refinancing to a specialist lender post-conversion. The finance pathway must be planned BEFORE acquisition, not after.

Exit liquidity. Selling a rooming house is harder than selling a standard residential property. The buyer pool is narrower (typically other rooming house operators or investors), valuation is more variable, and the property may need to be either sold as a going concern (with established tenants) or 'restored' to a Class 1a configuration to maximise the buyer pool — which costs $20,000-$50,000 in reverse-conversion. Most rooming house investors hold for 7-15 years to amortise both the conversion CAPEX and the eventual restoration cost.

Council enforcement variation. A council that is permissive in 2025 may tighten in 2030 in response to community pressure, density concerns, or political change. Operators in Brimbank and Whittlesea have historically had stable regulatory environments, but 'historically stable' is not a guarantee. We monitor council planning scheme amendments and recommend that clients participate in the relevant property investor associations to stay informed.

PremiumRea's rooming house portfolio experience

We have helped clients acquire and convert multiple rooming houses across Brimbank and Whittlesea since 2020, and the pattern is consistent: high-yield clients with sufficient deposit, time, and risk tolerance for a more operationally intensive asset have done well; clients who underestimated either the conversion CAPEX or the management overhead have done less well.

The profile we now require for a rooming house client engagement:

• Minimum property purchase budget $750,000 plus minimum $120,000 conversion CAPEX reserve (so total deployed capital starts around $920,000).
• Acceptance that net yield will be 5.5-6.5 per cent, not the 7+ per cent that gross yield headlines suggest.
• Willingness to use a specialist rooming house property manager from day one.
• A 7+ year hold horizon to amortise CAPEX and absorb regulatory cycle risk.
• Pre-approved finance pathway (typically 80% LVR conventional purchase + post-conversion refinance plan).

Clients who match this profile have generated outsized risk-adjusted returns versus standard single-tenancy investments in our portfolio. Clients who do not match this profile we steer away from rooming house strategies and toward standard yield-and-growth properties in the same corridors. Some clients are not the right fit for this strategy and the honest conversation needs to happen on the first call.

If you are evaluating rooming house investment in Melbourne and want to walk through whether your specific situation — budget, time horizon, risk appetite, finance setup — fits the strategy, we are happy to do a 30-minute strategy call at no cost. We will tell you on that call if we think a rooming house is the wrong call for you. About 1 in 3 prospects who approach us about rooming houses end up being better suited to standard single-tenancy yield strategies, and we say so directly.

Update — late August 2026

Since this guide was first published, our rooming house conversion book has grown large enough to rank suburbs by measured results rather than theory. Across our 48 client rooming conversions settled between October 2023 and September 2025, the mean gross yield measured against total cost including conversion was 6.96% (median 6.94%, range 5.5% to 8.44%), with post-conversion rents averaging $1,146 per week across that same 48-conversion sample. Those are historical portfolio results, not a forecast.

The spread between suburbs is wide enough to matter: within that 48-conversion sample the strongest corridor means sit around 7.2-7.4% and the softest around 6.3-6.5%, which on a fully deployed ~$900K position is a difference of several thousand dollars of rent a year for the same effort and the same compliance burden. We have now published the full breakdown — suburb by suburb, with sample sizes and the demand drivers behind each — in our suburb-by-suburb ranking of Melbourne rooming house results.

Demand-side conditions in the corridors we buy in remain firm: room tenants are predominantly single workers near industrial, health and education employment, and the enquiry volume our property managers report per advertised room has stayed consistent through winter 2026. Regulatory settings are unchanged since our last review — the Rooming House Operators Act registration regime and the Class 1b thresholds described above are still current as of August 2026.