Everybody’s Home’s recent 2026 Priced Out report has reignited calls for rent caps.
We understand the sentiment. Western Australian rents have risen significantly over the past few years and rental affordability is at the lowest level in decades.
Rent caps are an appealing idea. They are also the wrong tool for the job.
A cap acts on what a home costs to rent. WA’s shortage is a problem of how many homes there are to rent. Those are two different problems.
Nothing in a rent cap will add a property to the rental pool. It does not release land, shorten an approval or give anyone a reason to build. It sets a rule about what can be charged for something there is already not enough of.
We know what happens next.
A major study of San Francisco’s expansion of rent control, appearing in American Economic Review, found landlords responded by reducing rental housing supply by 15 per cent.
Stockholm operates one of the world’s most heavily regulated rental markets. According to the Stockholm Rental Agency, nearly 900,000 people were in its housing queue in 2025, with an average wait of nine years for a home.
Ireland is often held up as the model Australia should copy. Yet its housing crisis persists, and in May, the International Monetary Fund recommended removing rent controls to help boost rental supply.
The pattern holds across all three. A cap does not improve scarcity – it changes who waits and how long they wait.
None of this is an argument against regulation. REIWA supports sensible tenancy law. Renters are entitled to security, proper protections and a clear set of rules covering their relationship with the person who owns the home they live in.
Good regulation also has to consider how rental housing actually gets provided. Most Western Australian rental homes exist because a private individual chose to put their own money into a property for someone else to live in. That choice is made one owner at a time. It can be unmade the same way.
An owner who decides the numbers no longer work can sell. The house still stands but it may stop being a rental, and every property that leaves takes a set of keys out of a market which is already short of them.
WA’s rental market remains under enormous pressure. We should be doing everything possible to encourage investment in rental housing while appropriately protecting the people who live in it.
Because, ultimately, there is one economic reality no amount of regulation can change – if we want more rental homes, someone has to be willing to invest in providing them.
Rent caps don’t solve that problem. They risk making it worse.
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