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Prepare to smack your smartphone, laptop or phablet in shock: the vast majority of tenants are happy with their landlords. This is deeply disturbing news to a column whose stock in trade is angry tenants complaining about landlords and letting agents.
However, a survey by domain.com.au has found that more than 73 per cent of renters have good relationships with their landlords, the majority of whom fix problems with the properties promptly and efficiently.
Also, nearly 60 per cent of respondents think rental increases have been reasonable, and 64 percent believe they are paying a fair market rate for their rental.
“We hear stories all the time about nightmare rental properties with broken fixtures that the landlord is unwilling to fix, and greedy landlords unfairly jacking up the rent,” said Stuart Benson, domain.com.au’s property spokesman. “However this does not seem to the common experience.”
This is bad news. Flat Chat deals with the unhappy chappies of apartment living so it’s worrying to hear that most of you are happy with your lot.
However, on the plus side, 27 percent of you are at least a little bit unhappy. So remember, if you do have a problem, we’re here for you!
You can raise your own issues, or even praise your landlords or tenants, HERE. And you can read the whole press release HERE.
And, seriously, if you are having problems with your landlord (or tenant) THIS is a page of links to interstate tenant advice services and government agencies in your state or territory.
The opinions offered in these Forum posts and replies are not intended to be taken as legal advice. Readers with serious issues should consult experienced strata lawyers.
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Hmmm. Sounds fishy. Surely it’s been rigged??
This discussion leads to several interesting areas.
For example, how many landlords are happy with their tenants?
Maybe this is a job for Bill Randolf and his team at the Faculty of the Built Environment at UNSW.
But there’s an important underlying issue here and a major fallacy. Most people think about strata in terms of residential owner-occupiers and that just isn’t so. Apart from the many commercial and industrial strata schemes, the majority of strata lots are owned by investors! About 53% in NSW and an estimated 60-65% in Qld and Victoria. Take away investors and you take away a lot of value. And take away investors and the housing stock in Australia suddenly plummets leaving people homeless.
And this leads to some interesting maths. Owner-occupiers deserve their say. And similarly investor owners. But so do tenants. So for every 100 strata lots, we have 160 people with a vested interest!
It’s been suggested in the past that tenants should have the same rights as owners which is clearly a nonsense. But, tenants (and investors) are the majority and need a better way to communicating their issues. The current link from tenant to property manager to owner to OC breaks down too often.
@Mojo said:
Hmmm. Sounds fishy. Surely it’s been rigged??My initial reply to this got lost in the great Flat Chat Crash of Friday August 9th so here goes again.
Not rigged but is it scientific? No more or less than any other informal polls, given that the majority of polls should carry the disclaimer “according to the kind of people who respond to polls …”
I have been told that these figures were collated from responses by people registered to domain.com.au plus those who took part in an online survey.
So in answer to the question, how scientific is it, you’d have to say “not very. But how significant is another matter. What we can reasonably assert is that a lot more tenants seem to be happy with their landlords than you might think. And that, really, is as much as you can take from this – it’s just nice to have something positive to report about rentals, for a change.
The opinions offered in these Forum posts and replies are not intended to be taken as legal advice. Readers with serious issues should consult experienced strata lawyers.
I’d suggest it is reasonable to suppose that someone with a grievance is more likely to answer the survey than someone whose only comment is that they are quite content. If that is correct one could suppose that the survey, if it has a bias, is more likely to be biased to underestimate the numbers of contented tenants.
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