CASTERTON’S second-largest employer is struggling to fill places on its roster, with a lack of available rental housing in the district deterring workers from taking up employment.

Edgarley chief executive, Sue Wray said the assisted living facility’s management was desperately trying to fill a number of positions, including critical nursing staff roles, but attracting staff from out of town was becoming increasingly difficult.

“We keep being told there’s nothing to rent in the area,” Ms Wray said.

“I’ve just had two registered nurses who applied for positions, were offered the jobs and were ready to take them, but then knocked back the offers, purely because I had to tell them we couldn’t give them anywhere to live.

“We’re competing with the metropolitan areas for staff; it’s easy to move from Sydney to Melbourne to take a job, where there’s a vacant house nearly on every corner.

“But to get same staff to come out to rural area – you just can’t.”

She said buying was also not an option for new staff arriving in town.

“They can look at buying in six month’s time, when they’ve got a banking history and had a full-time job for a while, but until then they can’t approach the bank for any kind of finance,” she said.

Ms Wray said the lack of housing was not a new one.

“We had new staff come in last year, we put them up in empty independent living units on-site, which is really not suitable, until they could get appropriate accommodation and two of them are still living in the Kelpie Units,” she said.

“Even for myself, I ended up in one of those tiny units on the way out of town at the top of Mount Gambier Road; you have a tiny room for a bedroom, a tiny room that is your kitchen and living, a little bathroom and laundry – with my daughter and husband visiting.

“And I was lucky to even get that – it was the only thing available at the time.

“Right now, I have one staff member on extended leave, so I had to employ an interim manager; he and his wife – who will both stay on with us – are living in a tiny little unit, they can’t get a house locally.

“They had something potentially lined up in Hamilton, which fell through, but that is still a 40-minute drive each way to work, which is not ideal when we want to keep them here in town.

“We’ve a got responsibility to residents to provide best service can, if we can’t get staff how do we provide service at that quality level?”

Ms Wray said the lack of housing in the district needed to be dealt with “at a higher level” and she had written to local MPs Dan Tehan and Emma Kealy, as well as Glenelg Shire Mayor, Anita Rank, with a desperate plea for all levels of government

“We need support, because it can’t be just be us that’s in this situation,” she said.

“The hospital needs staff and wider afield, you’ve got a health service in Coleraine; I imagine they don’t have place for people to come to either, if they have to relocate.

“This has got to be something that is an issue, across the board.”

She said incentives for developers to enter the region with solutions for housing, such as apartments “or another hotel” and to work on suitable growth to attract residents, needed to come from the upper echelons of government.

“Development is not the total sum answer – Casterton is a wonderful country town, we love it because it’s small, everyone knows everyone and we have an amazing community … we don’t have the big shopping centres of other towns, but we have schools, health and all the essential services we need,” she said.

“But there still needs to be a higher level of planning and work at a higher level to publicise the town and get it thriving, incentives for people to come in and build houses and have their houses available for rent.

“There also needs to be some sort of financial incentive, some sort of concessions on buying a house so it can happen earlier, when you’re moving to a regional area for employment.”

Gorman’s Real Estate’s Peter Gorman said the rental market had been in extremely short supply for some time and “up until now” the agency had had “nothing available” for quite some time.

He said low interest rates had increased property sales over the past two years, with local first home buyers taking the opportunity to enter the property market and others using it as an opportunity to invest – also depleting sales inventory.

“We’ve got a couple of (rental) properties on the market now, but there has been nothing available for a long time,” Mr Gorman said.

“People have sold elsewhere, taken the opportunity to buy here for what they perceive is cheaper housing, a cheaper lifestyle, which it has been in the past.

“The low interest rates, I would say is the biggest factor in the big drop in houses for sale; people who couldn’t possibly have purchased before, well we’ve sold a lot of houses up to $200,000.

“A couple of people have bought houses in town, used them as investments, I think one has been used as an Air b’n’b.

“So the rental and sale listings are pretty scarce everywhere,”

Mr Gorman said when rentals were available, “expectations” quite often played a big part in discussions over available listings.

“The standard of housing available is probably not spic and span, they’re quite liveable but some people’s expectations are quite a lot higher than what’s available,” he said.

“Renters come from a modern brick home in a metropolitan area, where they’re paying $400 or more a week in rent and they find a country house here for $200 or $220 a week and they say it’s not up to standard,” he said.

“Everything works okay, it’s just not up to the modern standard they’re used to, so it’s more that there’s nothing to their standards, that’s available.”

He said Casterton came in well under the Real Estate Institute of Victoria’s monthly rental average quotes for regional Victoria, with his most expensive tenanted rental property attracting less than $300 per week.

REIV figures reported the proportion of vacant properties fell to 5.1 per cent for metropolitan Melbourne from January to February, this year, while it remained at 1.3 per cent for regional Victoria over the month.

The weekly median rent for houses in metropolitan Melbourne saw a slight decline to $495, while it went up to $418 in regional Victoria.