Page 985 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 26 July 1989
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There are also uncertainties with relocation. Under leasing arrangements as they currently stand, a tenant can be shifted at any time to some other location within a shopping complex. Any tenant who suffers an order to relocate also has to face paying for the full cost of the move. Nor is there any right of appeal. Tenants are completely at the mercy of their landlords' whims, and they can easily lose trade by being located in a less attractive or less busy part of a shopping complex. If a tenant decides to sell rather than move to somewhere less profitable, he or she will have little goodwill left to improve the selling price. It is not hard to see that the threat of relocation acts as a powerful disincentive to tenants who might otherwise want to stand up for whatever slender rights their leases allow them.
All outgoings which have been covered in relation to tenancy properties, such as shopping centre maintenance, cleaning costs, heating, garbage collection, rates and taxes, have to be met by the commercial or retail tenants themselves. This is obviously in stark contrast to the residential tenancy market, where a landlord accepts responsibility for these expenses which arise from ownership, like maintenance, rates and taxes. The imposition of all associated costs on tenants would have less effect if rents were set more fairly and were subject to control, but for the moment rents remain completely at the landlord's mercy.
There are plenty of other factors which our survey identified as giving rise to widespread dissatisfaction. But, whether we are talking about any of the problems I have already mentioned or excessive bonds, discrimination between large and small leaseholders and so on, the Assembly needs to acknowledge that virtually every aspect of tenancy arrangements in the ACT stacks the odds squarely against the tenant.
While the Residents Rally accepts that the capital risks involved in building or buying retail centres and units entitle landlords to expect and to earn a fair return on their investment - I repeat, a fair return on their investment - we do not expect that the mere fact of owning buildings in the ACT should somehow be regarded as a licence to print money. We do not, and cannot, condone a situation in which landlords have free rein to impose whatever rents and conditions they feel like imposing, particularly when it is at the cost of the commercial livelihoods of their tenants. But at present in Canberra landlords have almost unlimited scope for squeezing tenants as hard as they want, through rents, tenancy costs and prohibitive lease conditions.
From the Rally's point of view, it seems that only the existence of those landlords who are not prepared to abuse the power available to them is keeping the Canberra retail rental market from reaching a crisis point. But the fact that there are landlords who deal fairly, honestly and
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