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Rats came through the bathroom wall, rain leaked through the dining room ceiling and there was a large hole in the laundry ceiling where a builder’s apprentice fell through while re-roofing.
The house a Wairoa family had been renting since 2012 was not exactly comfortable but it was their home in the current housing crisis and they wanted to stay.
For the past five years, the family had been asking their landlord to do various maintenance jobs to make it more liveable. Many of those jobs were only minor but he had failed to act.
When he finally did decide to attend to the property — only this year and apparently only after advice from a new property manager — he turfed the tenants out and would not commit to letting them return once an estimated $55,000 worth of identified repairs were done.
The family had to go in search of new accommodation in the town’s already overstretched rental housing scene.
They also went in search of some compensation. They applied to the Tenancy Tribunal for the landlord’s attempt to terminate their tenancy without grounds, retaliatory notice, notice to quit, failure to maintain the property and breaching Healthy Homes Standards.
The tribunal found in favour of their claim about the lack of maintenance and awarded them $3600 in exemplary damages.
In a decision recently released online, tribunal adjudicator C Price rejected the landlord’s excuse that the cost of doing the maintenance jobs requested had far exceeded the rental income and that it had been hard to get a plumber for three years.
That attitude was “unacceptable”, the adjudicator said.
The family had endured “constant damp and mould, leaking ceilings and substandard housing conditions”.
They had young children, including a son who had been “sick from the damp”.
“It has been an extremely stressful and frustrating situation for a long time for their family.”
In addition to the holes in the wall and ceilings, the family had also repeatedly complained about:
In dismissing the tenants’ other claims, the tribunal said the landlord’s decision to terminate the tenancy wasn’t without grounds or retaliatory. It was unlikely to have been triggered by the latest complaints by the family, which were essentially just a repeat of earlier ones.
The landlord had produced evidence he intended to do maintenance work to the interior of the house and had been advised by a builder it wouldn’t be safe for the family to remain there during that time.
The tribunal agreed with the safety assessment. It noted the landlord’s comments he was not willing to “have that conversation” with the tenants as to whether they could eventually move back in. The landlord said the cost of the work would be significant and the tenants had been paying “very low rent”.
The family’s claim that the landlord breached Healthy Homes Standards couldn’t be upheld as the tenancy began before those regulations were introduced and the terms of it had remained unchanged.
The tenants claimed $1800 in compensation for unnecessarily high electricity bills they said were caused by the leaking hot-water system. However, the adjudicator said they lacked necessary evidence.
Since the family had won a significant aspect of its case, their request for name suppression was granted.
The landlord’s request for anonymity was also granted because he finally appeared to be making efforts “to bring the house up to a better standard” and “because of the importance of available housing for tenants in the Wairoa region”.
However, the adjudicator warned the landlord that suppression might not be considered if there were any future similar claims against him.