The Victorian government’s new affordable rental housing will be allocated to tenants by random ballot rather than need, with applications to be processed by a company already under scrutiny for what advocates have called a “troubling” use of renters’ data.
The first tranche of 34 houses from the 2,400 promised in the affordable housing rental scheme – part of the Andrews government’s “big build” construction blitz – were advertised in January.
The rents will be set at least 10% below the median market rent for Melbourne areas, and capped at 30% of the median income. In regional Victoria, rents will be set at the median market price for the area and capped at 30% of the median income.
To be eligible for affordable housing in Melbourne, applicants must be earning under $64,020 for a single person, $96,030 for a couple, or $134,450 for a family. Income thresholds are lower in regional Victoria.
The homes, however, will be allocated by ballot rather than a needs-based assessment, with applicants properly screened for eligibility only after the ballot has been conducted and a prospective renter selected.
Monty Hill, a representative of the Renters and Housing Union, said the fact that a ballot was perceived as necessary was a problem in its own right.
“While it’s really hard to quantify individual circumstances, there would be people in there who have a much more urgent need for housing than others. That is objectively the case, and it’s worrying if the more vulnerable people in that list are being left by the wayside,” Hill said.
“It worries me that the reason that there is a ballot may be due to lack of resources [to assess all applications] rather than a question of fairness.”
A spokesperson for the state’s housing agency, Homes Victoria, said the ballot system was an attempt to remove bias from the system, to create “a fair and transparent process where all eligible applicants have an equal chance of being offered an affordable home, directly addressing a key pain point for renters in the private market”.
Homes Victoria has engaged controversial rental tech company Snug to create a purpose-built platform to take applications for the program.
Last year, a Guardian Australia investigation revealed Snug’s opaque and potentially discriminatory use of applicants’ personal data to “score” them against properties, giving them a higher score when they offered to pay more rent.
Privacy experts, academics and renters advocates expressed concern after analysis of Snug’s patent application suggested its intention was to collect wide-ranging information from users, including friend lists, social media networks and ratings on third-party platforms such as Airbnb and Uber, and to develop a kind of rental credit system.
Snug denied that the “match score” function facilitated rental bidding and claimed its mission was to “make renting easier” thanks to a platform designed “to facilitate a better relationship between renters and agents”. The company did not disclose which data points went into its match score, and its spokesperson said the company had “no foreseeable plans to implement further permissible data attributes contained conceptually in the patent application”.
The Homes Victoria spokesperson said the “bespoke, purpose-built” application portal for the state’s affordable housing “does not include the aspects of Snug’s platform that have raised concerns, including the ‘match score’ function”.
Snug is a “technology partner” of the Victorian Affordable Rentals Consortium (VARC), a coalition of community housing associations and private companies, including Barry Plant Real Estate and social enterprise Property Initiatives Real Estate.
The VARC will manage tenancies of the affordable housing program over the coming years.
Tenants Victoria, which was consulted by the government on the affordable housing scheme, welcomed the program.
“More generally, however, we retain concerns about the interface of privacy and technology in the rental sphere,” said Jennifer Beveridge, the chief executive of Tenants Victoria.
