How landlords could end up in hot water

More than half the residents of strata are renters, meaning that there a lot of buildings around that are almost totally tenanted.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that  … until things start to go wrong with the building and the rental agents and strata managers have all shut up shop for the weekend or, even worse, their Christmas and New Year  holidays.

That happened to Flatchatter Farm Kate recently, when her building’s hot water system failed for the umpteenth time and repairmen refused to attend without a work order from the strata manager.

“Besides emailing my agent asking for a rental reduction, what other options do I have?” asks Kate.

Bearing in mind that this is a recurring problem with the hot water system, Kate and other renters would do well to either take collective action at Fair Trading to force their owners corp to fix the hot water system properly, or take individual action against their landlords to get them to step up to the plate and demand that their fellow owners do the right thing.

A large part of the problem is that this is one of those grey areas that conveniently lets landlords wriggle out of their responsibilities. “It’s a strata issue so there’s nothing I can do about it …” is an all-too common response that leaves tenants to suffer the consequences.

So let’s deal with this first piece of nonsense first.  Landlords all over Australia have a legal duty to provide essential services, including hot water, to their tenants.

In most states, owners corporations (bodies corporate) have a legal duty to maintain and repair common property and that duty is unlimited and unqualified.

And here’s the rub: the landlord is a member of the owners corporation and therefore CAN do something about this.  Saying ‘it’s too hard’ is no better an excuse than “it’s not MY problem”.  It is your problem and it doesn’t matter how hard it is, you and your fellow owners have a duty under law to get it done.

By the way, owners corps who squeal that they don’t have the money are clutching at just as flimsy a straw.  If you don’t have the money, get it.  You don’t have any choice in the matter.

And when you have sorted that out, start charging reasonable levies and stop using the cheap-as-chips contractors to work on bog-standard infrastructure.

OK, so where does the tenant fit into all of this, especially when the hot water system fails and the people who are supposed to be arranging to have it fixed are nowhere to be seen.

According to THIS  NSW Tenants Union factsheet on repairs and maintenance “failure or breakdown of any essential service for hot water …” comes under urgent repairs.  That means with a stand-alone system and no response from the landlord or their agent you can go ahead and order the repairs yourself and demand the cost back from your landlord.

And THISTenants Union of Queensland factsheet also includes hot water services as a potential urgent repair for which, when the landlord or agent can’t be contacted or refuses to do anything, you can pay up to the equivalent of two weeks’ rent to get the work done yourselves.

OK, common property is different from private property and paying to have common property fixed when the landlord isn’t legally in a position to do that off their own bat might seem a bit risky.

But, feasibly, in a real emergency when nobody from the landlords, their agents or the executive committee can be contacted, a group of tenants could pay for the repairs and demand compensation from their landlords.

And you could certainly threaten to do that in the future in a joint letter to your strata manager and strata committee. Meanwhile, maybe when the landlords are getting their money back from the owners corp, they might do something about getting the problem fixed properly, as the law clearly demands.

By the way, this offers a very good reason why there should be a spot for a tenants’ representative on strata committees, as is proposed in the strata law changes.  If no one is going to look after tenants, they should be allowed to look after themselves.

There’s more on this HERE in the Flat Chat Forum.

And readers in Victoria should note that you now have your own Flat Chat website HERE.