When you enter a tenancy agreement, either as a landlord or a tenant,  you’ll need to be prepared for disputes that may arise with your new tenant or landlord. Being prepared will help you avoid problems ending in a dispute.

Instead of immediately going to court, there are a few options in resolving property disputes. It’s a good idea to state in your rental agreement what steps you will take to remedy a dispute.

Our featured expert Chris Kwan, Barrister & Solicitor, will give you some tips on how to resolve disputes between landlord and tenant.

How to Resolve Tenancy Disputes?

Below is an edited transcript of the video by Chris Kwan:

Hello, my name is Chris Kwan and I’m a lawyer practising in New South Wales, Australia. I also run the website ozrealestates.com. It’s an auction website for Australian properties.

A good friend has asked me to discuss about how to deal with disputes between tenant and landlord. Well it is a very tough thing. What actually happens is that the landlord doesn’t get involved. What you’re actually having is a dispute with the agent itself.

An agent looks after the interests of the landlord and whatever the agent says usually is what the landlord would be agreed to. It is not something to do with rental because you can’t get away if you’re late, and you have to pay interest which is stated in the contract.

Let’s say the tiles in the bathroom are falling off, or mouldy, or inside the vanity cabinet, the wood has been damaged because water has been leaking along the cabinet. The agent can argue that you should have told them that water was running over into the vanity cabinet, and because of that, it has actually damaged the cabinet and so on.

What you can do first is, of course, try to resolve it with the agent. In most cases, the agent would advise you that they will get a quotation from some tradesmen to fix the problem and they always tell you that they are going to charge it back to you. They will get two or three quotations and they will probably choose the cheapest one. Now what you can do is that you can also tell the agent that it’s not your fault. You didn’t know and you didn’t look at the vanity cabinet. You didn’t notice the water was dripping, and so on and so forth.

But just for argument’s sake, things didn’t go well. So what do you do next? You can actually go to New South Wales Fair Trading. They have what we call a free tenancy person that will help you to resolve this matter. It is free so you don’t have to pay a cent. You just have to go to the NSW Fair Trading website. We call it the Fair Trading’s Free Tenancy and Real Estate complaint service. It’s for resolving complaints or disputes. This is the best way to do it because most of the people don’t have money to get lawyers and usually things don’t work out right. Tenants get threatened, agents get very upset and people get very emotional. So the next stage of course is to go to the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal. This is the one that is going to cost you some money because it is actually like a court itself, but you can run the case yourself. Now a lot of the times it basically has to do with money so the court will look at whether it’s your fault or whether it’s the fault of the of the landlord, including the agent.

Usually, if the problem is involved with damage to the property and the damage was caused by yourself, whether it is negligence or not, or whether you just don’t know, or you just don’t really care and so on and so forth, they will proportionate it. That means they have 50/50, but if it is really your fault, it’s going to be a hundred percent. If it’s not your fault, for example, somebody hit the flat or damaged the door, there was a fight outside and if they broke down the door, then those kinds of things will be covered by the insurance company.

Okay, thank you very much! I limit it to five minutes. So if you have any questions, let me know. Thank you! Bye!

Chris Khai Kwan
Barrister & Solicitor, High Court Australia
Principal Lawyer, KhaiKwan Lawyers
E: info@khkwan.com