Aussie beach holiday? Prepare to be stung, and not just by the mozzies

It took me a bit of getting used to my beloved husband’s idea of a holiday. Sea. Sand. More sea. Way too much sand. And renting a house by the beach seemed just like taking your normal daily responsibilities 100 kilometres away but without the dishwasher. No. Thank. You.

Up the coast? Down the coast? The Aussie beach holiday is now a $30,000 proposition.Credit:Matt Davidson

Then I got used to it. A Hills Hoist on which to hang the sandy towels. An outside dunny. A verandah during the rain. That was the minimum after a rained-out camping holiday at Pebbly Beach where the people in the next tent kept shouting at their two-year-old not to eat kangaroo poo.

But it looks to me like we might have to reimagine what summer holidays look like in Australia. In June, I booked a place in Marrickville-by-the-sea (also known as Currarong) for 10 days, big enough to house the most important people in my life: my grandchildren. It cost more than 10 per cent of average annual household earnings in NSW.

I went searching just now to help a friend who also wants to take her entire family away. That much closer to Christmas and that much closer to 25 per cent of annual household earnings. Yes, $30,000 for a beach holiday in January. When I looked in June, there were maybe 15 houses. Now just one. We used to be able to go in Easter and at Christmas, if we budgeted well enough. That would be unreachable for most young families these days.

You can find smaller places, fewer bathrooms, no dishwashers, for far less. But as soon as you click on the beachside areas, no matter the size of the house, this alarming message comes up: “More people than usual are searching for these dates, so now’s a good time to book.”

In some areas of NSW, Byron for example, short-term rentals are way down on pre-pandemic levels, so no wonder it’s hard to find anything – and the long-term rental market is non-existent. Can someone tell me what all those negative-gearers are doing except increasing rents and evicting long-term tenants who don’t want to cough up an extra 20 per cent?

Fixing Australia’s long-term rentals is more of a priority, but there is something dreamy about summer holidays. CoreLogic research director Tim Lawless crushed those dreams. He says the kinds of beach holidays my kids had, in houses with plenty of bedrooms and spare mattresses and at least two toilets, are now out of reach for most Australian families.

He lives in Noosa and sees summer rents soaring where he is. When long-term rental availability is below 1 per cent, the short-term rental market suffers. He suggests I start looking inland, even though in the very next breath he tells me his family did not enjoy their own inland holiday. I thought maybe I’d succumbed to SouthCoastMania, but even the Central Coast is bad.

Stuart Sinclair, principal at Ray White Tea Gardens Hawks Nest, said the short-term holiday homes market had been crazy busy. The agency uses pre-COVID November 2019 as its benchmark: 180 bookings over 110 short-stay properties. Now it’s 400 bookings on the same properties and the cost is 10 per cent higher than three years ago.

“Despite all the travel restrictions being lifted, people are still holidaying at home. Most people come to us within a three-hour radius,” he says. Yep, that’s the distance before the kids beg to be let out of their car seats.

I thought this year, of all years, the Australian beach holiday would be a bargain. Borders open! Masks on. Up, up and away. Surely everyone would be jetting off to Bali. To Vietnam. To New Zealand. But no. That’s too expensive. And too scary thanks to the unique management style of Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce, whose idea of kiss-kiss-make-up is a $50 discount voucher, which then caused the carrier’s site to crash during any attempts at retrieval.

Lawless, acknowledging his own unhappy inland trip, suggests camping, caravaning, apartments by the beach. Far cheaper.

I went looking for cabins close to the beach on the south coast to see more alarming messages: “Dates unavailable. Please adjust your dates.”

So, I’m briefly smug. Place booked. Nearly paid off. But next year it looks like I’ll have to book summer at Easter. And Easter in July.

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