In America it's common for one company or landlord to manage an entire building. In Australia that's extremely rare. In NYC for example, you have co-op building

In America it's common for one company or landlord to manage an entire building. In Australia that's extremely rare. In NYC for example, you have co-op buildings, which is a new concept to me. Australia really has no equivalent. Pretty much all apartments in Australia are "condos" in American nomenclature (it's not a word Australians use). Real estate agents list properties for rent, typically in their windows, on their website, in the newspaper and/or on one or both of the big property websites (RealEstate.com.au and domain.com.au). That's one thing I like: when looking for a rental you only really need to check those two sites. It's unusual to put a "for rent" (or "for lease") sign up. "For sale" sure. You can rent something directly from the owner but it's reasonably unusual. Even if the owner finds a tenant they'll typically use a real estate agent to manage the property (do inspections, organize maintenance, take the rent and so on). So anyway, the lack of rental signs doesn't mean anything. In my experience you only see them in front of larger buildings on the lower end of the economic scale.