Tricia Ray-Kepa has managed to turn a rundown 3 x 1 rental on a noisy thoroughfare in Perth into a charming home, despite its shortcomings.

It is packed with vintage furniture, art and plants, but it is badly needing repairs and there is no air conditioning so it can be boiling in the summer.

The couple cook on a portable gas burner because, they say,  the ageing electric cooker is faulty, while the rest of the kitchen is old and shabby.

They put up with all of that because the house, by Perth's standards, was cheap at $350 a week and is in a good location in the leafy suburb of Mount Claremont.

But, about a month ago, the couple got a nasty shock.

"My real estate [agent] called and he just said 'Tricia, are you going to stay or are you going to go?'," Mrs Ray-Kepa said.

"He said, 'because we're going to lift the rent, $100 a week extra'.

"I suddenly felt very stressed and anxious.

Mrs Ray-Kepa says she was told they would have to be out of the house in 28 days if they did not agree to pay the extra $100 a week.

Since then, the couple has managed to negotiate down to an increase of $75 but still say it is more than they can afford.

Mrs Ray-Kepa is one of scores of tenants who have flooded legal and financial services since the state's COVID-19 rental moratorium - which prevented landlords from increasing rent or evicting tenants - ended in March.

"I rang [community legal service] Circle Green because I wanted to know my rights, it didn't sound right that we had to be out in 28 days," Mrs Ray-Kepa said.

Her real estate agent, Sam Zeedan, sees it differently, saying the rent has not gone up at the property for the three years since Mrs Ray-Kepa moved in, while the owner's rates and water rates had increased.

He said Mount Claremont was an expensive area with houses starting at $500 per week and he believed Mrs Ray-Kepa had been more than looked after.

A report being released on Thursday paints a dire picture of soaring rents and evictions, three months since the moratorium was lifted.

The report by the Housing Emergency Response Group [HERG] says evictions have spiked and average rental prices have increased by 15 to 20 per cent, while social housing waiting lists are growing.

HERG was set up in April and represents not-for-profit groups and charities who say they are experiencing the full brunt of the impact of the end of the moratorium.

The Financial Counselling Network of WA says the number of clients seeking help has more than doubled since November to 889 clients in May 2021, with housing being the single  biggest reason for people approaching the service.

Circle Green Community Legal says it has experienced a 500 per cent increase in calls to 200 a day since the moratorium was lifted, but only half are able to be answered.

A different perspective on the report has been provided by the Real Estate Institute of WA's Damian Collins.

He said WA still had the cheapest rent in the country where 17.8 per cent of household income was spent on rent, compared to close to 30 per cent in NSW.

Mr Collins said he did not accept that landlords were being greedy.

“Most people are being quite reasonable, most landlords are … negotiating with tenants and not necessarily jacking up all the way to where market conditions are," he said.

“Even although we have seen some increases in rental evictions, we’ve got to remember there are 240,000 rental properties in Western Australia and where there are problems, there’s only a very small percentage.”

Mr Collins said there was a push to have limits or caps set on the amount that landlords could increase rent by but that he did not support the move.

“Rent caps, all they are going to do is make a bad situation worse,” he said.

“Anything you do like putting rent control in is only going to make investors not come into the market, it will make the housing situation worse."

The report also stated that the number of people added to the By-Name homeless list in Fremantle and the Perth CBD had increased from 628 to 1041 since November, including 200 people since the moratorium was lifted.

The waiting list for public housing has also blown out, with the report showing that while the total social housing stock has fallen, more than 2,000 people had been added to the waiting list in the past year.