Page 531 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 23 March 2022
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like, Johnno, but not (insert minority group here). I don’t want my house to smell like that cooking or that food.”
At that time, there were absolutely no rules and regulations specifically in any real estate code or the Residential Tenancies Act, aside from the Discrimination Act, that would have prevented that diabolical instruction. We have heard it put that landlords do not get the ultimate say and that the property manager does. That is naive and does not understand the relationship that exists between a property manager and a landlord, and the conversations that they have.
What usually happens in this heated market is that way more applications come in than that landlord can possibly service. The property manager is usually underpaid and usually has not attained the highest level of qualifications that would allow them to provide a professional, high-level service—at no fault of their own, might I stress, Madam Speaker. This is usually at the hands of the rent roll owner or the licensee in charge of these agencies, but that is perhaps a conversation for another day.
If you have a hundred applications, you take out the ones that you think your landlord is going to like, and maybe you take out the ones with the last names that might bother your landlord client. Then you pick out the ones that have offered more than the asking price. That might be four or five. If you are a property manager managing 180, 200, 220 properties a day, you could not possibly do all 100 of those applications justice. You could not process all of them effectively, call every single reference, before you give advice to your landlord, so you have to cull them somehow and you bring it down to who can pay more.
Would it not be wonderful if there was a situation where prospective tenants in our city, as they scroll through realestate.com.au or Allhomes, could sort the properties in a not too dissimilar way? Just imagine what it might look like on Allhomes if you jumped on and saw properties in Kambah—one for $500 a week, three bedrooms, one bath; another one there, $500 a week, three bedrooms, one bath—and one had a five-star rating from the past tenant and the other a one-star rating. What would you do, as the prospective tenant? Imagine that they are open at the exact same time. You can only see one. Which one would you go and have a look at? I know which one I would go and have a look at.
I know and I trust and I expect that there will be members of this place who will make contributions in the debate around how this is tinkering around the edges—that it does not fix the housing affordability crisis, that this is not a substantial reform, and I might give that critique that. But I think Mr Pettersson summed it up perfectly in his speech when he said, “We must do all that we can, where we can.” We have discussed at length over the last few days all of the things that we cannot change, unfortunately, to fix the national housing crisis, and the implications of that national housing crisis on our city.
But we can continue, as a progressive, forward-thinking, leading jurisdiction, to role model good practice to other jurisdictions, to set the standard to encourage new social norms. I think that it would be an incredible hallmark of a progressive government to say that for too long the power balance in the landlord-tenant relationship has been
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