“I had a home and I had to sell it 15 years ago, and we were never able to get back into the market,” she said. “It is just too hard to save a deposit while you are renting.”

As a small business owner she is a Liberal voter at federal level, but hopes both major parties will review their policies for renters.

“It has really made me reconsider,” she said.

The rent rises are broad-based across Melbourne, at both ends of the price spectrum.

Some of the largest jumps are in bayside suburbs that shone during lockdown as remote workers moved to the beach. Rents in leafy suburbs on the north-eastern fringe are also up, but so are several affordable outer suburbs and some well-heeled inner enclaves.

Excluding the soaring Mornington Peninsula, the top three suburbs for house rent rises were close to the water, in Black Rock (up 20.1 per cent), Patterson Lakes (up 17.1 per cent) and Beaumaris (up 14.2 per cent).

There were double-digit rises for renters chasing the greenery of Diamond Creek and Lilydale, or the cachet of South Yarra and Elsternwick, and high single-digit rises in affordable locations across the city from Beaconsfield to Keilor.

Domain’s chief of research and economics, Dr Nicola Powell, said the shift was driven by reduced supply and increasing demand from the return of international students, as well as domestic students feeling confident to move out of home.

“It is technically a landlord’s market across all of Melbourne, and that’s the first time we’ve seen that since pre-pandemic.”

Barry Plant executive director Mike McCarthy said rents were rising “almost across the board”, and that demand had increased as young adults leaving home shared with fewer housemates to reduce COVID risk, or wanted a spare bedroom to work from home.

“It wasn’t quite as pronounced in the west,” McCarthy said. “But certainly through the inner, and the north and into the east, you were seeing a level of increase in demand that was driving increasing rents.”

Buxton chief executive Nathan Jones noted Victoria’s rental reforms, which legislated a minimum standard for rental properties such as front door locks, vermin-proof bins, water-efficient shower heads and a heater.

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“That just makes the overall rental product a more expensive product,” he said.

Some landlords had decided to sell or move back in rather than meeting the standards, reducing the supply of rental homes available, he said.

The laws have also driven investor selling in the Frankston area, where rents rose 12.8 per cent, Zebra Property Management department manager Nadine Arslan found.

“We don’t have as many investors in the market, we have got a lot of tenants wanting to lease properties,” she said, adding that some try offering up to $50 a week extra to secure a property.

“We have a huge list of people waiting. Most of the time they are snapped up before they are even listed.”

Grattan Institute economic policy program director Brendan Coates said rental affordability was a significant issue, with about half of low-income renters in rental stress, which is defined as spending more than 30 per cent of their income on rent.

He recommended a boost to Commonwealth Rent Assistance, which has been indexed to inflation and not to rents, and has fallen behind.

Coates also called for the state government to reform planning rules to allow more housing to be built where people want to live.

“More lower-income older Australians are renting now than in the past, as home ownership is falling, and that’s going to cause big problems down the track,” he said.