Amenities, premium services, and rental premiums in Melbourne’s build-to-rent sector: a hedonic analysis

Purpose This paper aims to examine the sources of rental premiums in Melbourne’s Build-to-Rent (BTR) sector and assess whether higher rents are associated mainly with observable amenities or with residual BTR status. Design/methodology/approach A hedonic regression framework is applied to a cross-sectional data set of 251 two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartments listed on Realestate.com.au in April 2026, comprising 86 BTR apartments and 165 private rental sector (PRS) apartments. Weekly asking rents are analysed rather than contracted lease prices. This study estimates the BTR rental premium after controlling for structural, locational and amenity characteristics. Given the cross-sectional design, the findings of this study are interpreted as associative rather than causal. Findings The full model achieves an adjusted R² of 0.65. BTR apartments are associated with a raw rent premium of $158.80 per week or 19.4%. After full controls and amenity adjustments, the premium remains statistically significant at +6.3% with a 95% confidence interval of +3.8% to +8.9%. The BTR ownership dummy, which may capture institutional management, brand value, lease security and other unobserved quality attributes, explains a larger share of incremental rent variance than the amenity bundle. Concierge service and library/reading rooms are the only individual amenities that reach statistical significance. Research limitations/implications This study is based on a cross-sectional sample of 251 advertised rental listings collected from Realestate.com.au in April 2026, limited to two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartments in Melbourne. The analysis captures asking rents rather than final lease prices and cannot directly observe all factors embedded in BTR status, such as management quality, lease security, brand reputation or tenant experience. Future research could extend the sample across cities, dwelling types and time periods and incorporate tenant-level or transaction-based rental data. Practical implications The findings suggest that Melbourne’s BTR rental premium is associated more strongly with BTR status and its unobserved attributes than with specific amenities alone. This has preliminary implications for housing affordability policy, particularly where BTR is promoted as a solution to rental market pressures. Social implications This study has implications for housing affordability in Melbourne’s rental market. If BTR premiums are driven largely by institutional status and unobserved quality attributes rather than specific amenities, then BTR may primarily serve higher-income renters unless affordability mechanisms are incorporated. This raises questions about the role of BTR in addressing broader rental stress and whether policy incentives for the sector should be linked to affordability, tenant security and equitable access. Originality/value This study provides early empirical evidence on rental premiums in Melbourne’s emerging BTR sector using property-level rental listing data. It contributes to understanding whether BTR rents reflect measurable amenity provision or broader institutional and management-related attributes. The results of this study are specific to inner-city Melbourne two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartments listed in April 2026 and should not be generalised to the wider BTR sector without further research.