Accessible housing
Helping you to find a home
Looking for an (accessible) place to live?
Advice and tips to help you on your way
Finding a place to live that’s physically accessible in a wheelchair is essential when returning into the community after your injury and indeed throughout life.
If you own your home and it is not currently accessible – e.g. there are steps into the house or steps into the shower, the first thing will be to identify what you need to do in the way of modifications to make your home accessible. Visit our page on home modifications to see what’s involved. If you are renting and a property is not described as wheelchair accessible, it may still be worthwhile having a look. If there is lift access to the floor, level access into the apartment and no step into the shower then it is potentially accessible. It may only require some minor modifications such as installing a grab rail next to the toilet and the landlord might be very willing to install this. If you have allowed for home modifications in your National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) plan, there will be no cost to the landlord.
Public, specialist disability accommodation, supported and community accessible housing
Specialist disability accommodation (SDA), supported accommodation and public and community housing is available for people who can’t afford accommodation on the private market or who require additional support. Public housing is administered by state governments. To find out about how the schemes work, eligibility criteria and more visit the housing website in your state.
Finding private accessible housing to rent or buy
As you may have discovered it’s not easy finding housing to rent or buy that is already accessible. From time to time people notify SCIA if they have a property available so it is worthwhile giving us a call.
There are a couple of major property websites – Domain and Realestate.com where you can look for properties to rent or buy. You can’t specifically search for a wheelchair accessible property so a search trick you can try is: Go to Google and enter this complete search string into the search box or click the link following:
wheelchair site:https://www.domain.com.au/
or
wheelchair site:https://www.realestate.com.au/
This means you are searching Domain or Realestate.com only for the keyword “wheelchair”. If an agent has included this word in the description, then properties that are wheelchair accessible will come up in the search results.
