This report is designed to assist policymakers, policy influentials and the lay public to understand the issues around rent regulation and how to design and implement regulation. It provides a case study of the Victorian rental system including a small econometric supply elasticity study to look at trends in rents and what that data could reveal about likely outcomes from implementation of any regulatory system. 

The report reviews the international meta review literature for evidence as to whether rent regulation can provide protection for renters without generating negative side effects and to provide guidance on design and implementation issues around regulation.

Key findings

• Victorian case study data suggests a dual rent crisis, one structural and one point in time.
• Victorian rental data analysis suggests any negative side effects of a soft rent control, e.g. linked to the CPI, could be minimal and compensated by the greater security and less financial stress for renters.
• Rent regulation can have very different design attributes depending on what are the objectives of regulation, perception of the form and scale of rental increases and the market and institutional context.

Policy recommendations

1. The need for better rental data for monitoring of rental market performance and what that might suggest for policy interventions and evaluation.
2. The need to not see any potential rent regulation as a major solution to rental affordability and housing precarity but a complementary policy to a suite of more substantive policy reforms.
3. The need for just cause residential tenancy reform.
4. Establishing a national housing register.
5. The need for any rent regulation policy to be accompanied by a substantive consultation process given the contested nature of the issues and the range of often competing interests.