The rules made me raise my tenants’ rent by $50
For years I kept it low on purpose. Then Queensland, NSW, Victoria and a fresh set of money-laundering checks changed the maths – and quietly pushed the cost onto the people the rules were built to protect.
Last month I put my tenants’ rent up by $50 a week – from $730 to $780. I didn’t want to. For years I’d been nudging it up by about ten dollars a year, barely a coffee’s worth, because they’re the kind of tenants you quietly pray to keep. They treat the house like it’s theirs. Inspections are a formality. If loyalty were a line item, they’d have earned a discount.
So why the sudden jump? Because in 2026, being a generous landlord in Queensland stopped being safe. The rules changed, and my goodwill turned into a liability. This is the story of how a stack of well-meaning reforms – rental laws across three states, plus brand-new money-laundering checks on top – quietly reshaped the maths for every investor, and pushed the cost straight back onto the renters and buyers they were meant to help.
Why I used to raise it ten dollars a year
Good tenants are worth more than a few extra dollars a week. A house that’s looked after, rent that always lands on time, no vacancy, no 11pm phone calls – that’s the actual return, and it never shows up on a rent roll. Holding the rent a little under market was how I paid for it. Keep them happy, keep them staying, keep the place immaculate. Everyone wins. That was the logic, and for years it worked beautifully.
How Queensland turned my goodwill into a risk
Then Queensland tied rent increases to the property, not the tenant. Since 6 June 2024, rent can rise only once every 12 months – and, here’s the sting, that limit follows the property. You can’t reset it by signing a new tenant.
Read that twice, because it changes everything. If I hold the rent below market to reward a good tenant, I’m locked into that number for a full year. If they move out next week, I still can’t lift it for the next person until the clock ticks over. The old safety valve – catch up to market when the tenancy turns over – is gone. So every dollar of generosity is now a dollar I might never get back.
The rational response? Keep rent at market at every anniversary, no exceptions. A rule written to shield tenants from big, frequent increases has quietly done the reverse: it turned my gentle ten-dollar gesture into a fifty-dollar catch-up, because the gap I let open up is now expensive to close. I still love my tenants. The rules just made loving them costly.
One state fines you for an empty home. Another bans you from filling it.
Queensland isn’t a one-off. The same pattern – good intention, backfiring design – turns up right across the country, and the two clearest examples sit on opposite banks of the Murray.
In New South Wales, since May 2025, you can’t end a tenancy without a valid reason. Fair enough. But use the “I’m selling” reason, then watch the sale stall in a soft market, and you’re banned from re-letting that home for six months. So it sits there. Empty. Perfectly liveable. In the middle of a rental shortage, with renters queuing for exactly that.
Now cross into Victoria, where the logic flips completely. Leave a home vacant more than six months and the Vacant Residential Land Tax lands – 1% of its value in year one, climbing to 3% the longer it sits empty. So one government fines you for the empty home the other won’t let you fill. Pick a lane.
The compliance nobody sees on the invoice
Victoria has one more. Since 2021, rental providers must arrange gas and electrical safety checks every two years, whether anything at the property has changed or not. Nobody’s arguing against safe wiring. But the checks run like clockwork regardless, the person doing the inspection is very often the one who quotes any repair it turns up, and the bill – roughly $380 a year – doesn’t vanish into thin air. It gets folded into the rent, where the tenant quietly carries it.
Then, on 1 July, they stacked money-laundering checks on top
As if that wasn’t enough, 1 July 2026 brought the big one: Tranche 2 of the anti-money-laundering regime. Real estate agents, buyer’s agents, conveyancers, lawyers and accountants are now all “reporting entities.”
Let me be clear – this part matters. Property is a genuine channel for laundering dirty money, and AUSTRAC’s own risk assessment says exactly that. The goal isn’t the problem. The design is.
Here’s how it plays out on a single purchase. The selling agent has to verify you – and under AUSTRAC’s own guidance, a selling agent’s customer is both the seller and the buyer, so they check both sides. Your buyer’s agent verifies you. Your conveyancer verifies you. Your accountant, if you’ve used one, verifies you. Your mortgage broker and bank already did, months ago. Same person, same passport, five or six times over – like a nightclub that keeps stamping a hand it already stamped.
The maddening part? The law even built a fix. “Reliance” arrangements let one professional rely on another’s check instead of redoing it. Except the liability stays with you if the check you relied on turns out to be wrong. So nobody relies on anyone. Everybody re-checks. Each verification runs somewhere between $20 and $45 a person – more for companies and trusts – and it stacks up fast across a deal, before you count the hours and the delay. A system designed to stop duplication became a monument to it.
The number that ties it all together
Pile all of this up – the rent-increase trap, the empty-home paradox, the compliance creep, the verification circus – and landlords do the obvious thing. They leave.
In a single month this year, 1,532 more rental homes were sold off across the country than were bought to be rented out. Victoria alone lost more than 640 in that one month. Vacancy was already sitting near 1.3% in Sydney and 1.5% in Melbourne, against roughly 3% for a market considered balanced. Fewer rentals, tighter vacancy, higher rents – all landing on the households every one of these rules was written to protect.
My extra $50 a week isn’t greed. It’s a symptom.
What this means if you’re buying
If you invest in property, the lesson isn’t “regulation bad.” It’s that regulation has become a real input into your return, not fine print you skim on the way to the contract. Two properties at the same price and the same yield, in two different states, are no longer the same investment. The difference lives in the legislation – the rent rules, the vacancy taxes, the compliance load, the exposure to whatever changes next. (And that’s before the negative gearing and CGT reforms working their way through Canberra even enter the picture.)
That’s the part worth reading before you commit. It’s also the part most buyers skip – right up until it costs them.
The fair counterargument
To be even-handed: a renter advocate would say the real problem is landlords like me choosing to raise the rent or sell up, not the laws. And they’d have a point – nobody forced my hand. On AML, the checks exist for good reason, and property genuinely needs the scrutiny.
But that misses how incentives work. Policy doesn’t just set rules; it shapes behaviour. When the rational response to a “protection” is to charge more, leave the market, or drown a simple purchase in duplicate paperwork, the protection has misfired. Good policy works with the grain of the people who supply housing and move money legitimately. Too much of this recent batch works against them – and the shortfall, every time, lands on the tenant and the buyer.
Quick questions, quick answers
Did Queensland’s rules force landlords to raise rent? Not directly. But tying the 12-month increase limit to the property rather than the tenant removed the ability to catch up to market on turnover – which makes holding rent below market riskier and pushes many landlords to lift to market at each annual review.
When did the AML (Tranche 2) rules start for property? 1 July 2026. Real estate agents, buyer’s agents, conveyancers, lawyers and accountants became reporting entities and must verify their customers’ identities.
Are these changes making rents higher? Not directly, but several have raised the cost or risk of holding a rental. Combined with landlords selling up, that tightens supply and tends to push rents higher.