The soical housing tenant waited almost 18 months for most of the repairs to her home, which included leaky taps. Photo / 123rf
The soical housing tenant waited almost 18 months for most of the repairs to her home, which included leaky taps. Photo / 123rf
A social housing tenant who lived in a damp, cold and leaky house with her children while the landlord ignored her repeated requests to fix a list of problems has been awarded compensation.
But a recently released Tenancy Tribunal decision acknowledged that the landlord and social housing provider, Kāhui TūKaha, was “the meat in the sandwich” responsible for a house that needed expensive repairs, while trying to use its limited resources to help as many people as possible.
“Kāhui’s failings likely arise from limited resourcing and limited time,” tribunal adjudicator Robert Kee wrote, describing the overall situation as “fraught”.
“Other factors are the opaque, poorly-drafted agreement between the landlord and the lessor, and the landlord’s confusion over who was responsible for repairs.”
According to the tribunal’s decision, Valerie Walters moved into the Mt Albert house in November 2022. Walters rented the four-bedroom, two-bathroom house from Kāhui, who leased the premises from Good Neighbours Real Estate.
Within a year of taking the tenancy, Walters experienced significant maintenance problems that the landlord wasn’t fixing properly.
She wrote to her property manager at Kāhui complaining that two of the four bedrooms leaked during heavy rain, one of the bathrooms had no electricity, there were leaky taps in the kitchen and outside, and the water pressure was poor, with erratic water temperature.
The Tenancy Tribunal investigated the tenant's complaint about the leaky home. Photo / 123rf
About a year later, the owner spent $216 on what the decision describes as “modest work” but that “did not appreciably lessen the leaks”. By April this year, two bedrooms were uninhabitable because the leaks had worsened over time.
It took almost eight months to restore electricity supply to one of the bathrooms, six months to fix the kitchen mixer and two months to repair the stove.
In August last year, Walters complained to the tribunal that the landlord was failing to maintain the premises.
After a hearing in March, the tribunal issued work orders giving the landlord two months to replace the toilet, repair a leaking outdoor tap, repair the front gate, fix the leaks in two bedrooms and fix electrical problems by May.
The decision noted that despite reporting the issues in November 2023, most of the repairs weren’t completed until July this year. The leaks in the bedrooms still hadn’t been repaired, the decision said.
These unaddressed maintenance issues had a significant impact on the tenant. As a result of the leaky roof, one bedroom had to be used as a storeroom, the wall below the window in the master bedroom became waterlogged and crumbled.
“The house was damper, colder, and less healthy than it should have been,” Kee said.
In the meantime, the property’s owner, Good Neighbours Real Estate, issued Kāhui with a notice terminating their lease. Kāhui in turn sought to terminate Walters’ tenancy.
The adjudicator was asked to decide if Kāhui failed to maintain the premises, failed to comply with the tribunal’s work orders and whether its notice to Walters was retaliatory.
Kee found Kāhui failed to maintain the house and comply with work orders, awarding exemplary damages of $3300 to Walters.
But he refused to accept Kāhui’s actions in ending the lease were retaliatory, describing their representatives’ actions towards Walters as “balanced, fair and generally supportive of the tenant”.
They didn’t display any animus or vindictiveness towards Walters and weren’t overly defensive about her claims.
He accepted Kāhui’s claim that it gave notice to Walters because Good Neighbours had ended their lease.
In addition to the exemplary damages, Lee awarded a further $3300 for loss of amenity.
Catherine Hutton is an Open Justice reporter, based in Wellington. She has worked as a journalist for 20 years, including at the Waikato Times and RNZ. Most recently she was working as a media adviser at the Ministry of Justice.
