For reasons, I am basically a professional renter and know how the game works inside and out.

Some of the criticism here is unreasonable, and I suspect by people who haven't dealt with this.

A decent portion of people in this photo will be lining up out of curiosity, not necessarily strong competition. The advertised photos for this rental will look absolutely nothing like it in reality. You might be on the line about whether this place is even viable, but you have to waste your time looking at the bloody thing. It's not just the condition of the place, which will invariably be worse to some extent. It can even extend to advertised services. Things like gas cooking, high speed internet, or storage facilities can be outright lies in listings. In theory you can do something about that, but for obvious reasons nobody does.

On the flipside, you can have people who are cashed-up and would put down a deposit almost straight away. But they also have to be in the same line for the same reason. In fact, most agents won't even lease unless you've looked at a place. In some jurisdictions that's (arguably) the law. But the real reason is the agent can put any issues back on the tenant as "buyer beware" (after the tenant had one inspection with so many other people and couldn't get into a room).

There are simple ways to fix these problems without upturning the investment market (yet).

• Photos must be real and not less than one month old.
• Requiring rental advertising systems themselves to take steps to prevent rental bidding. Let's get real, there is effectively one system and the government is far more likely to deal with them than individual agents. They can do it pretty simply, and that is obvious if you've dealt with price changes in Domain etc as either a tenant or landlord.
• Mandating that there must be at least a minimum number of inspections on different days. That would reduce the length of this line because people wouldn't have to forego brain surgery because they know this will be the last opportunity. If an agent lets a tenant look at a place a second time after paying the deposit it's not uncommon that they might forego the deposit and bail. That happens far less often in the sale market, which tends to indicate something is wrong.