Page 2347 - Week 07 - Thursday, 4 August 2022
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to ask for references from a landlord’s previous tenants. The resolution also called on the government to report back on this matter before November this year. I am responding to this resolution today.
The nature of our current rental market and the tenancy application process create a situation whereby landlords are able to request significant information from the tenant as part of the application process for a rental property. This may include personal or sensitive information, such as information on their income, bank statements, current and previous employment details, rental history, including rent ledgers, and references from past landlords, employers and personal friends. While some of this information may be appropriate to request, in some cases the documentation asked for may go beyond what is reasonably necessary to assess a tenant’s suitability for a property.
Tenants, on the other hand, are often given little to no information at all on their prospective landlords. This may make it difficult for a tenant to know whether their prospective landlord has been found to have breached previous tenancy agreements or how quickly they have responded to maintenance requests.
While introducing a framework allowing prospective tenants to ask for a landlord reference from a previous tenant could potentially enable tenants to obtain more information on their prospective landlord, it may not facilitate the intent of increasing tenants’ rights, and in fact create inadvertent and negative consequences for tenants. Outgoing tenants, worried about their own future rental references, may be extremely reluctant to provide a negative rental reference for their previous landlord, particularly in circumstances where there are end-of-tenancy matters, such as the amount of bond owing, that are still to be determined at the time the reference is requested. Such a right also does not consider the burden placed on previous tenants, who may not otherwise have consented to being contacted once their tenancy has ended.
Another complication associated with landlord references is that many landlords employ a real estate agent to manage their rental property. Where this is the case, tenants may not have any contact whatsoever with their landlord, as all interactions are with the agent directly. When an agent is involved it may be difficult for a tenant to determine the true source of their concerns. Any reference about either the landlord or agent may therefore be inaccurate, particularly where the managing agent for the property changes between tenancies.
While landlord references may not be the solution to the information imbalance between tenants and landlords, the ACT government is committed to the ongoing improvement of tenants’ rights and is currently exploring how the issue could be appropriately addressed in other ways.
The Residential Tenancies Act already contains some protections for tenants by limiting what information can be held on a tenancy database—sometimes referred to as a tenancy blacklist. The act limits the information that can be listed to circumstances where the tenancy was ended by the tribunal due to a breach by the tenant or where more than the amount of bond paid is owed by the tenant. Tenants also have the right to review the information that is listed about them and to object to the listing if they consider it to be inaccurate.
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