To rent a property it is very easy to find a multitude that sit at the $600 per week mark and some even lower for the same number of bedrooms.
Lol this is completely meaningless:
“average” home price is going to be far higher than “average” rental price, because the price distribution of houses doesn’t match the price distribution of rentals (a $500 mil home isn’t going to have a matching rental property)
a home and an apartment are priced differently, so “$600 per week … for same number of bedrooms” could mean anything, including a $5mil 4 bedroom home vs a 4 bedroom apartment in a 50 unit building.
Suffice it to say: I don’t fucking believe you. Even in NZ, straight comparisons between mortgage servicing costs of a house and rental pricing of the same house would show weekly rent is more expensive than the weekly mortgage servicing costs. There’s good reason for that, too: in a market where the home is worth more than what can be extracted in rent, you would definitionally make more money selling the property than renting it out (and nobody would be doing it)
Edit: The only exception to this would be if you purchased the house at the peak of a housing bubble, and are now renting the house out after the bubble has popped and so you are unable to sell without taking a loss.