When more than 900 bright-eyed public service graduates descended on Canberra in the summer of 2012, most of them had to scramble in the capital's tough housing market just to find a place to live.
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But for the 700 rookies of the class of 2014, things are very different.
In 2012, the public service's graduate intake program was at a high-water mark ,and its recruits provided an annual opportunity to cash-in for the city's private landlords, who were also enjoying a good year.
But according to the latest figures from the Australian Public Service Commission, graduate recruitment to Canberra has slumped by nearly 25 per cent since 2012 and, while the commission would not provide exact figures on Thursday, 2015 looks set to be another lean year.
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Veteran real estate agent Genette Purnell is based in Kingston, ground zero for the traditional yearly graduate housing scramble, and she says the market has not been slow to notice the reduced numbers of fledgling public servants in the market each year.
"Normally we'd see the graduates come in December-January, and this year we didn't have anywhere near the volume of inquiries that we had the previous year," Ms Purnell said.
"The previous year was down on the year before."
The graduate drought is being felt beyond the market for apartments in the inner south, which in the good years are snapped up early, and is hitting landlords of larger detached houses.
"A lot of graduates want to get into a group house, so you'd get four people who work at DFAT or wherever, and they might rent a house up to five bedrooms," Ms Purnell said.
These day though, it's a tenants' market and landlord are doing things they would never have dreamt of just two years ago.
"Tenants are coming to us and saying they realise they are paying above-market rents now because rents have dropped," Ms Purnell said.
"So they're coming to us, asking us to approach the owner about reducing the rent, and in some cases we've reduced the rent by up to $80 a week,"
"So say if someone was paying $600 a week, we've dropped it back to $520 in order to keep good tenants, in order to keep the property occupied."
But after 27 years in the real-estate game, Ms Purnell has seen worse turbulence than this.
"I believe that the Canberra market is quite cyclical, and that we are in a trough at the moment which started when the Federal Election was called early in 2013," she said.
"The market has been affected generally, and the drop in rents is not only attributed to the fewer graduate positions being offered but the lack of confidence in public-service employment in general."
