The Herald reports a tenant advocate has complained about the TV reality programme Renters. They claim it unfairly portrays tenants as villainous machete-wielding, house destroying, rent absconding characters, and has ignored the many very good tenants.
Not having taking much notice of the programme I can’t really comment on its balance, but having read a large number of Tenancy Tribunal decisions (which are available online) one would have to question whether it may not be the tenant advocate who is lacking a sense of perspective. If I recall correctly, some 95% of all complaints filed with the Tenancy Tribunal are by landlords against tenants. On that score one would to say for every bad landlord there are 20 bad tenants!
When they next hear one slagging off at greedy landlords property
investors should find their voice and let politicians know that about the 20:1
ratio. I would like to see a politician get on their soap box and say they are
going to get tough on rogue tenants - if they did so they may well have a
gay-Maurice moment and gain the exposure they crave.
My experience is that most tenants are nice people who don’t live like
pigs, they do respect other peoples’ property, and do honour the tenancy
agreement they have entered in to. Unfortunately there are a minority
that don’t but that minority greatly exceeds the number of rouge landlords,
which I suspect is the point the TV show is making. Renters screens on TV2 on
Sundays at 7pm.
2 comments:
Depends on the class of property. Having worked for Housing New Zealand I can assert that a disproportionate number of tenants at the lower end of the market are shitbags.
we got out of the rental market because of bad tennants,I found that solo mums and Maori by far the worst.
Winning a dispute in the tennancy tribunal--what a joke!just words, we never saw any of the money awarded--they just skipped town.
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