If you’re a renter in Canberra, have you ever attempted to calculate whether your landlord’s rental increase was within the legal limit?
Well, 24-year-old Michael Turvey has, and found himself unimpressed with the plethora of complicated resources and the drought of accessible information for everyday Canberrans.
Astonished an online ‘rental calculator’ didn’t already exist, Michael took matters into his own hands and spent a few weekends building one, which, he says, “wasn’t incredibly hard”.
“A few months ago, I was personally looking to try and find out if my rent was going to be increased, how much it was going to be increased by,” Michael said.
“I started with the existing resources – I looked at what the government had, I looked at what the ACT Civil & Administrative Tribunal (ACAT) had made available, I looked at the Legal Aid advice – and it was all very vague and very confusing.”
Eventually, Michael figured out the Davinci Code-like system, that he says the average person “isn’t going to know how to do”.
“I needed to go to the ACAT website, which gave me a formula and linked me to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) website, where you had to find the right of 10 different spreadsheets, then get that spreadsheet, download it, find the right tab, of which there were six, find the column for Canberra rent, then find the change over time in the CPI for that column,” Michael said, clearly exasperated just retelling his complicated investigation.
“So, that was already completely mad, but then that only works if your last rent increase or beginning of the rent was 12 months ago. If it was something other than 12 months ago, that number only gives you an annual rolling average.
“If you want to find something other than a 12-month average, you have to go to the ABS data finder tool and pick out the stuff by hand. So, suffice to say, the process is incredibly complex and completely inaccessible to most people.”
Calling his friend Andrew for a helping hand, the pair got cracking on their project by requesting the ABS data set, which is available through an Application Programming Interface (API).
“I just built the front end, testing it with a few people and set it up. Honestly, it wasn’t incredibly hard… I put it together over a few weekends in my spare time. It seemed so easy and so wild that no one had done it before,” Michael said.
“The most surprising thing for me was that it didn’t exist, because while it took some work, it wasn’t super hard, and a professional developer could have done it in a few days. The [ACT] government could have done it easily.
“We have very good rental protection laws in the ACT, we are very lucky, but they’re not useful if people don’t know about them, or if they do know about them but can’t access them to figure out what’s allowed and what’s not.”
Michael is a member of the Greater Canberra group, a housing advocacy organisation, but he says this venture was completely independent and voluntary, stemming completely from his own experience scouring the internet for a simple solution.
Since developing his rental calculator, Michael has seen around 2000 people utilising his invention, proving the demand for answers from renters is out there; it was just finding a clear answer that was the problem.
“The average person isn’t going to know how to do this, or have the time to do this, especially if they feel like they’re under pressure or demands are being made of them,” he said.
“Most people do accept the increase because they don’t know they don’t have to, so you have to go looking. If you call up the Legal Aid helpline, they will try and help you figure out if it’s an allowable amount or not, but generally most people don’t even know.”
Michael has been a renter in Canberra since he was 17, and throughout the past eight years, he says he’s churned through “a lot” of rentals and has had his fair share of landlords lacking good intentions.
“A lot of tenants have bad stories about their experiences. I’ve never personally had an illegal rent increase, but I know people who have or have been told they need to accept something that they don’t need to accept,” he said.
“I’m in the Canberra Renters Facebook group, which is a really good support resource, and after I did this for myself, I was seeing people all the time saying ‘I just got this rent increase, I don’t know if it’s allowed but the landlord and the agents are telling me I have to accept it or I’ll be kicked out’ and, of course, none of that is true.
“You don’t have to accept it [rent increase] and you can’t get kicked out, at least not immediately. There’s a six-month turnaround time that people aren’t aware of.”
Personally, Michael has experienced landlords commonly denying repairs they were required to complete, and one particular home which had black mould “everywhere” that the landlord initially refused to have removed. And, he said, the standard insulation and heating problems a lot of Canberrans are facing this very second.
“We built a system on the understanding that renting is something you do until you buy a home and is something you do if you prefer the flexibility and the freedom to the stability and long-term investment of owning a property,” Michael said.
“If people are forced to rent, as many are, they should have security and they should have confidence that they do have rights. In terms of repairs, rental increases after you’ve started a lease, evictions … there’s an assumption that every renter has a backup option or an alternative and for a lot of people that is not the case.
“It [rental calculator] should have been something that was there a long time ago. In general, laws are something that should protect people, and should be complemented by communication.”
At 24 years of age and with a solid job in Canberra, Michael said it’s unlikely he’ll ever be able to buy a home in the city he genuinely loves living in.
“I don’t have the ability to get a really high collateral guarantor, so if I’m staying in Canberra, I’m looking at renting for the rest of my life. In some cities, you can rent for life, and it can be a very affordable, safe, and healthy experience, but that’s not a thing you can do in Canberra,” he said.
“I’d like to start a family at some point, but I don’t feel comfortable doing that while I’m still in a situation where a landlord could ask me to leave for no particular reason, or where I can’t rely on them to make repairs or where the rent could go up a significant amount.
“I really love Canberra, but it’s the biggest way we are failing as a city. People can’t afford to live here. We are doing so many things right as a city, but this is something that we are really, really not doing well.”
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