More than half of all Australians will rent accommodation, but regulations make securing long-term housing a lottery

Susan Fisher* is living in limbo. The Melbourne-based accountant was renting a house in the city’s inner west when she was abruptly served an eviction notice in late June.

She had moved into the property at the beginning of the year after being evicted from another Melbourne house at the end of 2016.

Yet Fisher is not a problem tenant. Far from it. She has never missed a rental payment in her life, she keeps the properties immaculate and because she is also a landlord, she understands her rights and responsibilities.

This may in fact be part of the problem, as Fisher believes her two eviction notices served in the space of a year were retribution for insisting on her rights.

“In the first house, I challenged every rent rise as excessive and on all but one of the four occasions the tribunal agreed with me,” she said. “In the end my landlord got sick of it. After living there for eight years, he gave me notice to leave.”

People are afraid to complain, they’re afraid to raise concerns in case they get evicted. Erin Turner, Choice

She found a similar property in a neighbouring suburb, but she said the landlord asked her to bypass the property manager and text him directly with requests. “There were so many faulty appliances and he was sending these dodgy tradespeople all of the time to fix it, which they weren’t doing properly, and my house was constantly full of tradesmen,” she said. “On legal advice I told him not to text me directly, but to go via the agent and two weeks later I was served an eviction notice.”

The landlord claimed he was evicting Fisher because she had sublet the house, but she maintains she had received permission from the property agent. She has challenged her eviction and is awaiting a judgment from the Victorian civil and administrative tribunal (Vcat).

“This is the problem with landlords being able to evict so easily,” said Fisher who, despite potentially needing a home, refuses to evict the tenants living in her own property. “If you ask for repairs or know your rights, they can kick you out and rent to tenants who won’t complain about mould in the bathroom or windows that don’t close or lock properly.”

Fisher’s story is far from unique. A report released in February by consumer group Choice, National Shelter and the National Association of Tenant Organisations found insecurity, fear and uncertainty were rife in Australia’s rental market, especially in, but not confined to, the febrile property hot spots of Sydney and Melbourne.

Rental affordability at crisis point for low-income families before the budget | Greg Jericho Read more

Unsettled: Life in Australia’s Private Rental Market depicts a grim existence for the roughly one-third of Australians who rent. Some 83% of renters in Australia have no fixed-term lease or are on a lease of 12 months or less, while 62% feel they’re not in a position to ask for longer-term rental security.

Meanwhile, 21% of renters said they had waited more than a week for a response to a request for urgent repairs, with 8% living in a property in need of immediate work. Another 50% said they were worried about being placed on a rental blacklist database.

The release of the report prompted numerous tenants to share their rental horror stories online, with the #rentinoz hashtag trending on Twitter.

Tenants Union of NSW (@TUNSW) #Rentinoz thread. We need to do much better! #abc730 #makerentingfair https://t.co/niVzXYIZ9m

Erin Turner (@ErinLTurner) Renters told to move back in to a house with asbestos - shows renters need better protections to stay safe #rentinoz https://t.co/nbbQG1c8ot

Renters posted complaints about both the standard of accommodation and their landlords’ response, including one instance in which a backyard sewerage pipe erupted for two days before the landlord finally paid a visit. The landlord then told the tenant that it couldn’t be sewage because the pipes were in the front and not the back.



In another case, a “black mass of mould” developed inside a renter’s shower nozzle only to have the landlord send his cousin around to deal with the problem.

One renter asked for a 12-month renewal of their tenancy agreement, rather than six, but was given the latter because the paper work was reportedly “easier”.

Another claimed the landlord hid nails sticking out of walls and mouldy carpets only to pocket the $1,800 bond when the prospective tenants failed to move in.

“The number one thing that came out of the [Unsettled] report was fear,” said the acting director for campaigns and communications at Choice, Erin Turner.

“People are afraid to complain, they’re afraid to raise concerns in case they get evicted. We have seen rental forms where the applicants were asked if they had ever taken a rental case to a tribunal, which is basically asking people if they have exercised their rights. There is a formal blacklist that people are afraid to get on, but there is also an informal one based on discrimination.”

A spokeswoman for Tenants Victoria, Devon LaSalle, said she recently spoke to a woman who had moved four times in five years. “Now when she gets into a new house she doesn’t even bother unpacking certain boxes,” she said. “She has no sense of security.”

The recent housing report by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (Ceda) warned that the housing affordability crisis was likely to last more than 40 years, prompting calls for greater protections for the growing band of renters.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Many tenants are too afraid to raise concerns about a problem with the property because they fear being labeled as a difficult tenant and then being evicted,’ said Ned Cutcher of Tenants’ Union of NSW, . Photograph: Fairfax media/Getty Images

“Something like half of the population will be renting in the future, so we do need to have the right legal structures in place for renters to ensure the power is balanced fairly between renters and landlords,” said Ceda’s research committee chairman, Rodney Maddock.

Right now, very few would argue that balance has been struck.

Stories abound of prospective tenants turning up to inspections with their application already filled out, even though the house they’re about to see may be full of damp, falling down or crawling with pests.

We read of desperate renters offering three and sometimes six months’ rent in advance. Of new apps disrupting the rental space with bidding auctions. Of queues of people snaking down the road for an open house inspection.

Even when they do secure tenancy, Australian renters often struggle to lock in a lease of more than a year, and many are on month-by-month leases. Not so in Netherlands, Denmark and Germany where “indefinite” leases are available to renters, and even if the tenant is on a fixed-term lease it is difficult to terminate the agreement without their permission. In Ireland, tenants are rolled on to a secure four-year lease after six months of renting.

In recent years the Queensland, Victorian and New South Wales governments have initiated reviews into their decades-old tenancy acts in a clear acknowledgment that laws enshrined some 20 years ago fail to protect tenants in today’s cut-throat rental market.

Last weekend the Andrews government in Victoria – nervous about an upcoming byelection in the seat of Northcote – announced a suite of measures to make renting fairer, including the establishment of a landlord blacklist to name and shame unscrupulous landlords, the banning of agents soliciting higher bids for rent, and the establishing the right of tenants to keep a pet provided they obtain the landlord’s written consent first. The legislation is expected to come into force next year.

In March, the Victorian government also announced the Residential Tenancies Act would be altered to allow for leases of longer than five years.

'I’m never going to afford a house': on the frontline of Sydney's rental affordability crisis Read more

But although tenants’ groups welcomed the most recent proposals to make renting fairer, they have pointed out that some provisions don’t go far enough.

They have warned, for starters, that longer lease terms are far from a cure-all. If leases of up to five years are already available and landlords aren’t offering them, what makes the Victorian government think leases of more than five years will suddenly become popular?

“The fact that longer leases are not attractive to landlords suggests it’s not simply about a regulatory fix, there needs to be actual market reforms, such as to no-grounds evictions,” said senior policy officer at the Tenants’ Union of NSW, Ned Cutcher.

In all Australian states, with the exception of Tasmania, tenants can be evicted when their fixed-term lease is up. If the tenant moves to a month-by-month lease, as many do, landlords also have the right to evict without grounds. Victoria’s new rules include a provision that allows landlords to end tenancies using an end-of-fixed-term notice to vacate only at the end of the first fixed term. At the end of subsequent terms, a landlord will only be able to end a tenancy using one of the specified reasons laid out by the act.

But, according to LaSalle, while the changes are a “significant improvement” and a “great first step”, they will not be enough to safeguard tenants’ security.

LaSalle called on the Victorian government to legislate minimum property standards for renters and to close potential loopholes in the area of no-grounds evictions.

End-of-fixed-term eviction notices should be banned entirely Devon LaSalle, Tenants Victoria

“We believe that end-of-fixed-term eviction notices should be banned entirely, as these notices could essentially be used as permissible forms of ‘no specified reason’ notices, ultimately providing renters with less security,” LaSalle said.

Similarly Tenants Queensland lists no-ground evictions as the most pressing problem facing tenants; in its recent submission to the Queensland housing strategy program lease length was not mentioned.

“Tenants are at a considerable risk of eviction towards the end of their [first] agreement,” Cutcher said. “Sometimes the landlord will say that they’re moving back into the property, but then the tenant will see it advertised for more money a few weeks later.”

Contrast this with many European countries, including France, Scotland, Netherlands, Ireland, Denmark and Germany, where tenants cannot legally be evicted at any stage without a valid reason.

“Many tenants are too afraid to raise concerns about a problem with the property because they fear being labeled as a difficult tenant and then being evicted,” Cutcher said.

“Everything flows out from these no-grounds evictions. There is no point in pushing for other things, such as minimum standards of properties, if tenants can be evicted without a valid reason.”

Another concern is the large number of rentals owned by mum and dad investors, according to Cutcher. “That means you have a market driven by housing providers who have no proven market reputation for supplying high-quality, long-term housing and they often have no interest in being the best landlord because they will possibly sell in five years,” Cutcher said.

National Shelter chief executive Adrian Pisarski thinks there should be greater institutional investment in rental properties to balance out the private landlord component, a proposal that has also been welcomed by the Property Council of Australia as a way of creating a new asset class and a “better product for renters”.

“The rental market will never change as long as you have mums and dads buying homes and renting them out not to be lessors, but for the capital gains,” Pisarski noted.

Sydney's rental affordability at a record low, report finds Read more

“We would like to see large institutional investment in residential property for the purposes of long-term cash flow – not short-term capital gains.”

In August Mirvac Group announced its entry into the build-to-rent apartment segment, confirming its intentions to build units in capital cities with the backing of superannuation funds who will reap returns from the rentals.

Lendlease and Macquarie Group have also shown interest in Australia’s nascent build-to-rent model, while Australia’s largest residential developer, Stockland, has called the model a potential game-changer.

Underpinning the discussions around the rental market is a growing awareness of a major societal shift: renting is no longer the sole preserve of university students or young people transitioning from home to home ownership.

The Unsettled report found that 24% of renters are couples with children and 11% are single parents. Many are renting because they cannot afford to build or buy, and they need a secure place to live in indefinitely.

“If a couple has a child, they want to know they won’t be moving on in a year. They can’t keep moving children between school catchment areas,” Turner said. “Also if you’re living in a house with mould, it affects your health and you’re more likely to get sick. Then there is the mental health aspect to rental insecurity.

“All of these factors exacerbate the division between the haves and the have-nots and it challenges the notion of Australia as a place of the ‘fair go’.”

Cutcher fears that by making secure housing a lottery rather than a right, Australia could be abandoning its commitment to egalitarianism. “We now have this strong tension between those who own their own home and those who rent,” Cutcher said.

“We have a group of renters emerging who grew up in middle-class families that owned their own homes, but now they can’t afford to buy so there is this growing discontentment that the great Australian dream isn’t being delivered.”

Meanwhile, Fisher, like many others, is playing the waiting game, uncertain where she will be living in a few months’ time.

“This whole process has been so stressful, I cannot tell you the way it has affected my life,” she said. “I have been in my doctor’s office crying. I’m on Valium to cope with the stress. It has been horrendous. And all because I knew my rights and exercised them.

“I am in this situation and yet I know what they legally can and can’t do. How would the average person have a hope in hell?”

*name has been changed.

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