There is a tendency in residential property to talk about landlords and tenants as though they’re opposing teams. Spend five minutes in the comments section of almost any sensationalist article about renting (or real estate in general) and you’ll find the usual characters. Every landlord is a property-hoarding parasite trying to extract the last dollar from someone who needs a home, while every tenant is one missed inspection away from smearing shit all over the walls and disappearing owing six weeks’ rent.
I’ve worked in real estate for close to two decades, starting as a trainee property manager, working my way through to agency owner. I’ve been a tenant, a home owner, a landlord. And neither description bears much resemblance to the majority of people I’ve dealt with.
A residential tenancy is obviously different from most commercial transactions because someone’s home is involved. There is an unavoidable personal element to it, and the consequences of getting it wrong can be much greater. Underneath that though, there is an agreement with clearly defined obligations on both sides.
Where we seem to get ourselves into trouble is when the administration of that agreement becomes a competition.
To the positive, I’ve watched attitudes on the landlord side change quite noticeably over the course of my career. A lot of the younger owners coming through now were tenants themselves relatively recently, and many had an ordinary time of it. They’ve waited weeks for maintenance, had emails ignored, dealt with agents who treated them with a certain degree of contempt, or fought over a bond at the end of a tenancy. When they’ve eventually become landlords, they remember how they were treated.
I now have owners asking about how we communicate with tenants, how quickly maintenance gets dealt with and how we approach disputes before they’ve asked me about management fees. I’ve had people effectively interview us on whether we’re going to be fair to their tenant because they don’t want to become the landlord they once complained about. I quite like that development.
At the risk of upsetting a portion of my client base, I find there can be a generational difference. Some of my, let’s politely call them older, clients are more likely to push back on maintenance or approach the tenancy from the perspective that because they own the property, they should ultimately get to decide what happens with it. That’s an anecdotal observation rather than one baked in measurable fact, and I’ve got plenty of older clients who are excellent landlords and younger ones capable of being complete pains in the arse. But expectations have changed. So has the law. The fact that something was acceptable when you first bought an investment property thirty years ago doesn’t necessarily mean it’s acceptable now.
We should also separate the average landlord from the media caricature. Right or wrong, Australia’s rental market remains heavily reliant on small private investors. ABS housing data has shown that, among households owning residential property other than their own home, around 68% owned only one additional property, and 24% had once called the rental property their home.
Research published by AHURI similarly describes Australia’s private rental sector as predominantly supplied by small-scale individual investors rather than large institutional landlords. That doesn’t make landlords inherently virtuous, nor does owning one property excuse poor behaviour. It does mean the idea that every tenancy sits inside some enormous property empire isn’t particularly representative of the market.
The shift on the tenant side has been just as noticeable. Tenants are better informed about their rights and considerably more willing to advocate for themselves than they were when I entered the industry. I wholeheartedly support that. A tenant shouldn’t accept an unlawful behaviour. They shouldn’t lose part of their bond because someone has conflated fair wear and tear with damage. If maintenance isn’t being addressed, they should know what options the RTA provides when repairs aren’t being completed, including the formal processes available when normal communication hasn’t resolved it.
Empowerment can occasionally tip into something else. We’ll receive a maintenance request advising that an appliance has stopped working and the next paragraph is asking what compensation will be offered. Sometimes compensation is absolutely appropriate. As an example, loss of an important facility for an unreasonable period can have a real effect on someone’s use of their home, and there are mechanisms for dealing with that. But the existence of a maintenance issue doesn’t automatically mean somebody has done something wrong. Things break. The relevant questions are what happened, whose responsibility it is and whether it was dealt with appropriately.
The same principle works in the other direction. A landlord shouldn’t see a vacating tenant as an opportunity to fund a refresh of the property from their bond. If something is genuinely damaged beyond fair wear and tear, claim it and have the evidence to support the claim. If it’s five years older than it was when the tenant moved in, that’s relevant too. Property management becomes unnecessarily adversarial when either party starts looking for technicalities that allow them to get one over the other.
I’ve never particularly understood that mentality because most tenancy disputes should be relatively boring to resolve. We have an agreement and a clear framework to work with. We should have an entry condition report, photographs, inspection reports, invoices, maintenance records, correspondence and a rent ledger. If those records have been maintained properly, they tell us what has happened.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be disagreement. Two reasonable people can look at the same situation and reach different conclusions, particularly around things like cleaning, damage and compensation. But the starting point should be the evidence and the obligations that apply, rather than deciding whose side we’re on and working backwards from there.
This is also where I think landlords need to expect more from their property managers. An agent isn’t doing a good job simply because they’re combative on the owner’s behalf. I’ve seen agents proudly take positions that have very little basis in the legislation because they think that’s what representing the landlord means. Apart from making the tenancy unnecessarily unpleasant, it’s an effective way of exposing the owner to disputes that never needed to exist.
Equally, fairness doesn’t require a property manager to roll over every time a tenant invokes the RTA. If the tenant caused damage, hasn’t paid the rent or hasn’t complied with the agreement, we should deal with that properly as well. Being neutral about the facts isn’t the same as being indifferent to the owner’s interests. In my view, properly representing an owner means giving them accurate advice, keeping good records and being prepared to tell either party when they’re wrong.
That’s becoming more relevant when owners choose an agent. Some of the landlords coming through now have experienced bad property management from the other side of the transaction, and they aren’t particularly interested in repeating it. They know that a tenant who receives reasonable communication, timely maintenance and fair treatment isn’t somehow getting something at the owner’s expense. In many cases, that’s exactly the sort of tenant relationship an owner should want to preserve.
There will always be dickheads on both sides. Property management has given me ample evidence of that. What I don’t think we should do is build an entire tenancy system around the assumption that the person on the other side is one of them.
For something governed by a written agreement, extensive legislation and an enormous paper trail, there should be considerably less room for tribalism than we’ve managed to create. Administer the lease, keep accurate records, deal with problems when they arise and apply the same standard to both parties.
Nobody needs to win the tenancy. It just needs to be managed properly.