Page 3639 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 23 August 2011
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databases have already been brought into law in New South Wales and Victoria and are currently being considered by the Queensland parliament.
Current part 6A of the Residential Tenancies Act provides some protections to tenants. For instance, it allows a tenant to bring an application to the ACAT for an incorrect or unjust listing to be removed from a tenancy database. This bill builds on these existing protections by clearly setting out which breaches of the tenancy agreement are serious enough to warrant a listing in a tenancy database. This protects tenants against listings for reasons that are arbitrary or for minor breaches. By clearly setting out the breaches that are serious enough to warrant a listing, this bill will also provide greater certainty to lessors and agents as to when they can list a tenant in a tenancy database. Also, by ensuring that any listing about a prospective tenant is for a reason that relates to serious breaches of a previous tenancy agreement, lessors and agents can rely on the tenancy database to provide reliable information about a tenant and not information which is vexatious or minor.
Because a listing in a database can have serious consequences for a tenant, including homelessness, any personal information about a tenant should be included for reasons that are just and reasonable in the circumstances. This is what the bill seeks to achieve. The bill also ensures the integrity of information contained in tenancy databases by requiring that information is accurate, complete, unambiguous and not out of date. This not only protects tenants’ personal information but also improves the integrity of information contained in tenancy databases. This is another way that the bill ensures that tenancy databases are a reliable and legitimate risk management tool for lessors when checking tenants’ rental histories.
The bill strengthens the existing provisions which require tenants to be notified of a proposed listing. Under these changes, a tenant will need to be notified by agents of any tenancy database used by the agency. The tenant will also need to be informed of any listing found by the agent in the course of searching the database. This will increase the likelihood of a tenant finding out that he or she is listed in a database without needing to go to the expense and inconvenience of searching multiple tenancy databases to ascertain whether he or she has been listed.
Although the new notice provisions place new requirements on real estate agents, they are not onerous or costly to comply with. A real estate agent would comply with the changes by amending the agency’s tenancy application forms to include the details of any database normally used. Because tenants normally return their tenancy application within seven days, as required under the notice provision, the notice provision is easily complied with.
If a listing about a prospective tenant is found when the agent checks the tenancy database, the real estate agent does not need to provide a copy of the information listed. The real estate agent would only need to notify the tenancy applicant that a listing was found, in which database it was found and how he or she can seek to remove the listing.
These new provisions do not impose an unreasonable regulatory burden on real estate agents. The increase in requirements on users of tenancy databases by this bill is
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