BTR Vacancy Rates Aren’t Telling the Full Story

Just how is BTR performing in Australia?

If you go by the number of apartments being released to market, incredibly well. But if you dig into the data you come up virtually empty handed. Data in this sector just doesn’t really exist.

This is an issue we need to fix as we grow. Without a shared, standardised framework for reporting performance, the industry is operating with one hand tied behind its back.

The vacancy rate problem

Vacancy rates don’t exist as a reported figure in BTR – and if they are, they’re opaque and unreliable. In BTR, performance largely lives behind closed doors, disclosed selectively if at all.

This matters more than it might seem. A vacancy rate in isolation is already a blunt instrument. It tells you a building is leased, but it doesn’t tell you how long it took, what concessions were offered to get there, what rents were actually achieved versus what was advertised, or how well the building is retaining tenants once they’re in. A project can look healthy on paper and still be quietly underperforming. Without standardised reporting, nobody outside the operator would know the difference.

A nascent sector with a lot to learn

To be fair, BTR in Australia is still young. Some opacity is inevitable in the early stages of any emerging asset class

But Australia can’t afford to wait. The sector is moving too quickly, and the stakes are too high. Investors and institutions are making significant capital allocation decisions with incomplete information. Developers are designing and repositioning projects without reliable benchmarks to stress-test their assumptions against. And operators have no way to credibly differentiate their performance in a market that can’t yet measure it.

Data as a competitive advantage — and a collective responsibility

We’ve been running OTP and BTR leasing campaigns for a number of years, and that experience has given us something valuable: real data. Data on leasing velocity, on how campaigns perform at different stages of a project’s life, on what clients should realistically expect and when. It informs how we plan, how we advise and how we set expectations with the people we work with.

But we’re one business. The insights we’ve accumulated are useful to our clients, but they’re not a substitute for an industry-wide framework. If operators, managers and advisors across the sector were contributing to and drawing from a shared pool of performance data, the quality of decision-making across the board would improve markedly. Campaigns would be better planned. Strategies would be better calibrated. And the conversation with prospective investors would be grounded in evidence rather than optimism.

What needs to happen

Standardisation won’t happen by accident. It requires the industry’s leading to agree on what should be measured, how it should be reported and how that data should be made accessible in a way that protects commercial sensitivity while genuinely advancing collective knowledge.

Better reporting leads to better benchmarking. Better benchmarking creates the certainty that investors and institutions need to commit to the sector at scale. And that scale is what Australia needs if BTR is ever going to meaningfully contribute to the housing challenge this country is facing.