Since August 20, Service New South Wales has approved more than 57,000 travel registrations that will allow people from Greater Sydney to go into the regions and look at real estate.
A Service NSW spokesperson said permission was only available to customers who genuinely needed somewhere to live and were not granted for people wanting to purchase investment properties.
Permits last for 14 days and if the travel dates or reason for travel change a new permit is required.
Byron Shire Mayor Michael Lyon said the figure was "outrageous" and putting regions at risk of COVID-19 outbreaks.
"There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that people are here when they shouldn't be and the whole system is being abused," he said.
Lismore Labor MP Janelle Saffin agreed and said she had been requesting a breakdown of the figures "for quite some time".
"All these lockdowns and all the pain and we need to understand what for," she said.
Cross-political push
Northern NSW MPs have joined forces to ask the state to better safeguard the region against a predicted influx of double-vaccinated city visitors.
The Nationals' Chris Gulaptis (Clarence), Geoff Provest (Tweed) and Ben Franklin MLC, as well as Labor's Ms Saffin (Lismore) and the Greens' Tamara Smith (Ballina) have written to Premier Gladys Berejiklian and Deputy Premier John Barilaro.
"We are really concerned that, without policy changes, our region will suddenly become deeply vulnerable to a major influx of newly freed Sydneysiders while we are still short of the 70 per cent safety target," the MPs wrote.
“We therefore ask you to adjust public health orders to prevent this happening, by restricting non-essential travel to the North Coast until it too has reached the milestone."
The MPs said such a move would give the city a chance to thank the regions for their support when vaccine supplies were redirected to Sydney HSC students.
'Tsunami' on the horizon
North Coast real estate agents say they are not seeing any dramatic increase in people from Greater Sydney travelling to the region to buy property.
Real Estate Institute of NSW director and principal of Bell Property Byron Bay Lennox Head Braden Walters said he was surprised to hear how many travel registrations had been approved.
"There are people who are providing us with those permits but not in obscene amounts," he said.
Mr Walters said most agencies in the region were reporting less than a dozen Sydney buyers per fortnight, who were seemingly abiding by restrictions.
But agencies were bracing for a significant increase in early November.
"I think as soon as the NSW vaccination rate gets to the level it should be, we will see a tsunami of buyers that will get out and make that decision to buy, and I would say aggressively," Mr Walters said.
'Calls haven't been answered'
Local government areas in the Northern Rivers region were forced into lockdown in August after a Sydney man and his two teenage children travelled to the region, allegedly to look at real estate.
He was charged with breaching NSW's public health orders and travel restrictions for property inspections have since been tightened, but Ms Saffin said they still did not go far enough.
Cr Lyon said he was at a loss as to how he could protect his community.
"We keep calling for the tightening of restrictions and the removal of some of these reasons and those calls haven't been answered," he said.
Ms Saffin is calling on the NSW government to come up with a regional roadmap.
"We want the consideration of a staged coming-out of the overall lockdown," she said.
