“As a tenant, what the owner and real estate says goes. It’s dehumanising. It’s like you’re stripped of any human rights,” said a Canberra renter.
Anna [not her real name] has been living nightmare as a renter, where she feels her landlord and the real estate agency see her solely as a figure on a bank statement, rather than as a human being.
From the very start of her tenancy, she said her landlord has clearly been uninterested in maintaining his asset, telling her, “if you leave me alone, I’ll leave you alone”.
She said that comment turned out to mean that if she didn’t ask for repairs, he would consider that in the amount of rent charged.
The rental agreement was initially a private contract until the landlord moved overseas and a real estate agency was hired to manage the property.
“Before we were with the real estate, I knew that the ceiling was sagging in the living room, and I told him he needs to fix it because a roof has caved in on me before, so I know it can happen,” Anna said.
“He wasn’t doing anything about it, so I had to get the three quotes and present him with the information, and liaise with the contractors to make sure it was getting done properly.”
She said her experience has been that if you ever question the rationale behind whether or not repairs are undertaken, you’re told “we’ll deem if they’re appropriate or not”.
“You just do what you have to do to keep your house safe for your children, and to keep your tenancy,” Anna said.
The heating in her rental was another repair issue, that was deemed non-urgent by the property manager and landlord.
Her family struggled through an entire Canberra winter with a broken heater.
“Just before winter I noticed the heating wasn’t working, so I reported it right away. It took four weeks after I reported it for the real estate to say, ‘yes, we know you’ve actioned it, we’re just waiting on something’ and the end result was another two months before the heating was actually fixed,” Anna said.
“We had to buy ourselves heaters for the house so we could keep our three children warm, and there was no compensation for our expense, and our electricity bill was double what is usually is because of the heaters using so much power.”
For every repair in her rental, Anna said she’s had to fight because there’s no minimum standard for rental conditions and if the law allows property owners to can get away with it, some will.
“At what price point do you pay for dignity in this market?” Anna sighed.
“Housing is not a human right anymore because it’s treated like a commodity and you can see it clearly in the market; affordability is just crumbling.”
Most recently, Anna said she identified a safety issue within the storage facility, which she believed to be an unapproved structure.
She said it took her four weeks of asking the property manager about it until they agreed to send out a builder, which took another few weeks, for him to deem the structure unsafe.
It then took another three to four weeks for the structure to be fixed; in the interim, a piece had fallen and hit her car in the garage, and there was no responsibility taken by the property manager.
When the structure was finally taken down, Anna said the property manager told her it actually wasn’t unsafe, and they didn’t need to remove it in the first place.
The biggest shock from the whole situation came the day after it was fixed.
“We put the request in for the safety of our children, and the day after it was fixed, we were given a vacate notice,” she said.
“They said our repairs aren’t justified because we pay less than the market rate for the property.”
Anna said her experience has been that her property manager knows the law is on their side, which can create tension or animosity between the renter and agents.
Out of fear of being left homeless, Anna said renters just have to keep quiet and put up with unsafe housing, because there’s no real alternative.
She feels as though she’s done everything she possibly can within her capacity as a renter and has been shown time and time again by her landlord and real estate agency that she “doesn’t matter”.
“We always get the response that they have the power, and we have none. We’re human beings, and it feels like no one cares. You could blame all of this on the market or whatever, but at every stage of all of this, there have been real estate agents with no heart left,” Anna said.
“The systemic issue within the market is where us renters have less and less rights to advocate for ourselves and there’s no metrics or assurance around measuring what the real estate agent’s capacities are for contributing to a market which just benefits themselves and profits at every stage.
“They’re not accountable to anyone.”
Have you had a bad experience as a renter with a landlord or real estate agency? Share your story with [email protected] or in the comments below.
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