Space has become a luxury for Vietnamese student Ellie*, who has been sharing a one-bedroom apartment with six other people for more than a year.

The 20-year-old from Ho Chi Minh City is paying $140 a week to sleep in a bunk bed in an inner-city apartment, but it’s not in her bustling home city in Vietnam, rather the Sydney suburb of Pyrmont.

There are two other students living in the same bedroom as Ellie, another two people sleeping in a small storage room without a window – which is a legal requirement of a habitable room – and a couple sleeping behind curtains that have been erected in the living room.

The Australian Catholic University student said her housemates were each paying about the same weekly rent as her, which meant the apartment was being rented for about $980. That’s well above the median rent of $550 for a one-bedroom apartment in Pyrmont.

“Sydney is really expensive and I guess we, as international students who don’t have money, need to stay in places like that,” she said, noting she had turned to advertising website Gumtree to find a place to stay as she couldn’t afford to pay nearly $400 a week for the university accommodation she was offered.

It’s a story many international students in Sydney know all too well, with plenty of advertisements on social media, websites and street posts offering crowded room shares across the city.

While a maximum of two people can share a bedroom in an authorised boarding house, it’s not uncommon to find four tenants crammed into rooms at other properties, or even people sleeping in makeshift sleeping spaces subdivided by illegal building works or partitions or curtains.

If a property provides beds for a fee or reward for five or more residents – not counting proprietors or managers or their relatives – it must be registered as a boarding house, a NSW Fair Trading spokesperson said. Each room must then provide 5.5 square metres of floor space for each person who sleeps in there.

Ellie estimates her housemates have less than the required space, particularly the pair who sleep in the storage room. She notes that, while she doesn’t enjoy living in such a small space, she had not known it could be illegal.

While extreme examples such as the 58 people found in an Ultimo house make headlines, the stories of students such as Ellie are common.

On Gumtree, a two-bedroom apartment in Pyrmont is being advertised as a home for 10 people for $1320, while one of two partitioned areas in the living room of an Ultimo apartment is being advertised for $140 a week.

One of two partitioned rooms in this two-bedroom Ultimo apartment is being advertised online for $140 a week.

*Inspecting an illegal rooming house

*The high cost of renting a bed in Australia’s capital cities

At another Pyrmont property advertised on Gumtree that was inspected by Domain, a tenant was living in a storage cupboard that was about two square metres and without windows, reportedly being rented for $125 a week.

With eight other beds being rented for about $160 a week, the two-bedroom apartment pulls in about $1405 a week in rent. In comparison, a similar apartment in the same unit block was advertised for just $660 a week early this year.

This ‘room’ in a Pyrmont apartment, which sits behind a partition and furniture, is being advertised online for $160 a week.

Tenants’ Union of NSW advocacy and research officer Leo Patterson Ross said illegal accommodation was typically found in the CBD, as well as areas such as Chatswood, Macquarie and Parramatta, where time-poor international students such as Ellie can easily access educational institutions and part-time employment at cafes, restaurants and shops.

Mr Patterson Ross said people staying in illegal boarding houses, often international students who had different accommodation expectations and little knowledge of their rights, risked being ripped off, evicted with just a few days notice and assaulted.

“We would get about 2000 people a year not covered by tenancy law, who are in these arrangements.”

Amr Hassan was convicted and fined $100,000 earlier this year for converting part of the Banana Supermarket in Chippendale into unauthorised residential accommodation. Photo: City of Sydney. Mr Patterson Ross noted that the City of Sydney, where Pyrmont lies, which had inspected more than 100 premises, executed 30 search warrants and conducted more than 50 interviews with suspects and witnesses since March 2015, was a very proactive council.

Its specialist investigation team managed to shut down an unauthorised accommodation network running out of Chippendale which was suspected to control at least 98 properties at its peak, a City of Sydney spokesperson said.

In May Amr Hassan was convicted and fined $100,000 for converting part of the Banana Supermarket in Chippendale into unauthorised residential accommodation, after a long and resource-intensive investigation by the team. He was also ordered to pay the council’s legal fees of $61,000.

A disabled toilet at the Banana Supermarket was turned into a makeshift shower. Photo: City of Sydney.

The spokesperson said the City of Sydney continued to monitor websites and social media for unauthorised accommodation providers promoting illegal accommodation.

Mr Patterson Ross noted that fixing the issue was also the responsibility of the state and federal government who regulated tenancy law and ensured the provision of affordable housing.

Minister for Innovation and Better Regulation Victor Dominello said the state government was harnessing big data to collect information on illegal boarding houses, but couldn’t publicly comment on any milestones that had been reached since the NSW Data Analytics Centre project was announced in May.

In 2015, a City of Sydney investigation found a bed in a bathroom of an illegal accommodation in the CBD. Photo: City of Sydney

He noted it was an issue of vulnerability, not affordability, and said students could find cheaper accommodation further down the train line, instead of “simply choosing to live in battery hen accommodation” that is not good for their health and safety, or the safety of others in the building.

He added that, while some universities were taking steps to provide more affordable student accommodation, they should be doing more, as they were the ones “making the dollars” out of international students.

When the Australian Catholic University was asked if it had plans to introduce more affordable accommodation, it had no comment, but a spokesperson noted it was committed to providing a mix of university accommodation, managed residences in the community and referrals to external providers.

*The university student’s name has been changed to protect her identity as she does not want to get in trouble from her landlord.

If you know of accommodation in the City of Sydney that you suspect is illegal, you can report it here.