Canberra's Covid outbreak has changed life at home for the city's young renters, with many locked down with housemates.
Locked down in a five-person share house certainly changed the dynamic for 20-year-old Victoria Doman.
Evenings and weekends spent together had suddenly turned into all day, every day.
"I don't feel that we're on top of each other or anything like that, it's just been strange to spend so much time with everybody. But it's also been quite nice," she said, as communal movie nights, baking together and breakfasts in the garden had supplemented daily routines grounded by Covid.
Lockdown for many of Canberra's young renters has been further complicated by the thousands of self-identified close contacts recorded in the first two weeks of the city's Delta strain outbreak.
Ms Doman and her housemates were quarantined after one housemate visited a close contact location, during which time another housemate was deemed a casual contact.
"That's the scary part of being in a share house as opposed to being a family that's locking down together," she said.
"Because all of our lives are so different, so all of our exposure locations are going to be so different.
"We are constantly checking it and being very vigilant because there's much more of a chance that one of us will have been somewhere."
Olivia Ransome Gilding, 22, is eager to find her way into a sharehouse after an urgent need to move saw her switching between Airbnbs.
"It's definitely more expensive than rent would be, and I do feel like I would have been able to find a house easier not during a lockdown," she said.
She was able to secure a new room in a sharehouse via digital interviews, and while she's confident about her new co-tenants, committing to housemates in a lockdown did weigh on her.
"You've got to think about where you're going to be next week and is it going to be a good place to go?" she said.
"You're going to be locked down with these people, so there's another stress on that as well that when you actually move house, there's a possibility that lockdown could be extended, and you could actually not be able to leave these people."
Sarah Hein, supervising solicitor at Legal Aid's Youth Law Centre, said the biggest legal issue she'd observed for young renters during this lockdown was occupancy agreements coming to abrupt ends.
"[What] I've seen probably more than anything is just really unfortunate situations in which young people who have occupancies, so they might rent a room in a private home, where those agreements have suddenly come to an end," she said.
"And generally, the young person is not given notice, according to their contract, and it just results in a very difficult situation for these young people."
Ms Hein said "relationships often get in the way of the law," under such agreements, with people living in close proximity to one another.
"And so I think it's important that people who do rent out rooms in their properties are actually aware of their legal obligations," Ms Hein said.
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