New tenancy laws coming into effect Feb 11 2021

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sir1963

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#2637813 19-Jan-2021 09:49

tdgeek:

GV27:

Many Govts - I'd say from National in the mid 1990s all the way through to today. And yes, there's a bit they can do. Severely curtailing the ability for objections to development in central areas with decent transport links would be a start - the NPS is a first salvo, but the inner Auckland area is a mess of volcanic view-shafts and height limits; so while villas in Mt Eden and Ponsonby are protected, we have thousands of houses being built in the North West with no public transport connections at all. Filling in gaps in Auckland's transport networks to connect brownfield developments in existing areas in preference to greenfield development - which might require revisiting transport agency funding and council debt limits. Auckland is still paying 50% of the CRL costs despite it being a nationally significant piece of infrastructure and decades overdue, but it's money the council can't spend on public transit and rapid transit in other areas to unlock more development.

That's before you get to tax, vacant housing, buyer's subsidies etc. The Helen Clark Foundation proposes we bail out home owners to the current value of their owner-occupied homes and then deliberately crash the market by hiking interest rates and using demand-shaping tools like DTIs and capital gains taxes - TBH I'm not totally opposed to that either.

I dont like fiddling. What I would like is build subsidies funded by seller stamp duty, revenue neutral. Along with obviously timely consenting. Make it so when I buy, doing a build is a no brainer. Increase buyer interest rates and use that to fund builds by reducing interest rates, that type of thing. That will provide a natural market movement, increase new stocks (helps the apparent housing stock shortage) and reduce buyer demand for existing homes. Win Win

How about limiting lending to 90% of the last GV (ie about 3 years back) for 1st home buyers and 40% for investment buyers.

You can only sell at stupid prices when people are able to pay stupid prices. If you suddenly needed to find an extra $150,000 - $400,000 as your portion then that will help dampen housing prices while still allowing for small annual increases.

allio

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#2637814 19-Jan-2021 09:59

antonknee:
sir1963:

From tenancy.govt.nz

Assignment of tenancies – All requests to assign a tenancy must be considered. Landlords cannot decline unreasonably. If a residential tenancy agreement prohibits assignment, it is of no effect."
And perhaps to protect tenants, what you are doing should come under the laws of a boarding house. Only seems fair and reasonable.

Perhaps it should - flat mate and boarder situations are ultimately impacting someone’s shelter so maybe there should be a stronger legal framework around this.

I think you need to do more reading on assignment - because landlords can decline for reasonable reasons but they do have to fairly consider the assignment, and there are options. Start here on page 30.

Tenancy assignment is to protect tenants from the situation in which they have signed a fixed term lease, they need to end that lease early and are prepared to arrange for another party to take over the lease to avoid loss of income for the landlord, but the landlord unreasonably objects and insists that the original tenant pay out the remainder of their lease. Example - relationship breakup.

If the landlord has valid reasons to reject the assignment, they can reject it and the lease remains active.

If they don't have a valid reason to reject the assignment, they can choose to either accept it or to terminate the lease, and start from scratch with a new tenant.

Hard to see anything unreasonable about that.

There is no scenario in which a landlord is forced to accept their tenant's scummy friend taking over a lease. Sir1963's concerns are either scaremongering or a basic lack of understanding of the law.

tdgeek

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#2637828 19-Jan-2021 10:13

sir1963:

How about limiting lending to 90% of the last GV (ie about 3 years back) for 1st home buyers and 40% for investment buyers.

You can only sell at stupid prices when people are able to pay stupid prices. If you suddenly needed to find an extra $150,000 - $400,000 as your portion then that will help dampen housing prices while still allowing for small annual increases.

Yep, but exclude TRUE first home buyers, but as I suggested make building a no brainer, lets get out of this A buys from B loop

antonknee

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#2638593 20-Jan-2021 09:28

allio:

Sir1963's concerns are either scaremongering or a basic lack of understanding of the law.

Which unfortunately is what usually comes out whenever changes are made to tenancy law in this country - remember the wailing and gnashing of teeth when Healthy Homes Standards were proposed and then introduced?

"Mum and dad" landlords are often ill-informed about the law. As was rightly pointed out earlier in the thread, a lot of landlords are just people who paid their mortgage and thought it logical to buy another house, they don't know the ins and outs of their business. So-called professional property managers are often not much better to be blunt.

And then you have the likes of Andrew King and the NZ Property Investor's Federation who specialise in spreading FUD around tenancy law changes...

sir1963

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#2638601 20-Jan-2021 09:46

antonknee:

allio:

Sir1963's concerns are either scaremongering or a basic lack of understanding of the law.

Which unfortunately is what usually comes out whenever changes are made to tenancy law in this country - remember the wailing and gnashing of teeth when Healthy Homes Standards were proposed and then introduced?

"Mum and dad" landlords are often ill-informed about the law. As was rightly pointed out earlier in the thread, a lot of landlords are just people who paid their mortgage and thought it logical to buy another house, they don't know the ins and outs of their business. So-called professional property managers are often not much better to be blunt.

And then you have the likes of Andrew King and the NZ Property Investor's Federation who specialise in spreading FUD around tenancy law changes...

https://www.tenancy.govt.nz/law-changes/

Assignment of tenancies – All requests to assign a tenancy must be considered. Landlords cannot decline unreasonably. If a residential tenancy agreement prohibits assignment, it is of no effect.

Please explain "unreasonably" , this is a "how long is a piece of string" word. What is reasonable to one person may not for another. Given how I have see some extreme housing advocates demanding rentals be confiscated by the government (and I assume they consider themselves "reasonable" people) , there would be a LOT of leeway here. We have had the tenancy adjudicators claim that multiple dogs who urinated and defecated in a rental that did not allow pets was "wear and tear" , the owners had the finances and it ended up in the high court where it was deemed a lifestyle choice and therefore NOT fair wear and tear. Most landlords do not have the money to go this far.

As for healthy homes, I know that did cause rent increases which was one of the predictions.

antonknee

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#2638813 20-Jan-2021 13:34

sir1963:

Please explain "unreasonably" , this is a "how long is a piece of string" word. What is reasonable to one person may not for another. Given how I have see some extreme housing advocates demanding rentals be confiscated by the government (and I assume they consider themselves "reasonable" people) , there would be a LOT of leeway here. We have had the tenancy adjudicators claim that multiple dogs who urinated and defecated in a rental that did not allow pets was "wear and tear" , the owners had the finances and it ended up in the high court where it was deemed a lifestyle choice and therefore NOT fair wear and tear. Most landlords do not have the money to go this far.

As for healthy homes, I know that did cause rent increases which was one of the predictions.

Much like "reasonably clean and tidy" - this is the kind of thing that doesn't need (IMO) to be enshrined in the Act. It can be worked through in practice via the Tenancy Tribunal much as other aspects of the act which are open to interpretation are.

It's like the initial application for a tenancy - it would be unreasonable to decline a tenant based on race or sexuality, but likely reasonable to decline a tenant based on anti-social behaviour or similar. It's not carte blanche for a tenant to assign a tenancy to whoever they want and the landlord has no say.

All this is doing is formalising what happens in practice now. A tenant wants to exit a fixed term and helps the landlord out by finding a suitable tenant to take over the lease.

I'm not sure how much of an increase you can put on HHS to be fair - I'm struggling to find data, but what I have found so far seems to imply rents have increased YOY and QOQ fairly regularly with no real spikes around HHS or the original insulation regulations. I'm not saying you're wrong, I just don't know how much of an issue that actually is.

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networkn

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#2654479 11-Feb-2021 10:35

One thing I am curious about, with the new changes...

The ability for renters to now paint if they wish, are there specific rules around what colour, if they require to meet a particular standard of painting, use appropriate paint for the surface, and if they are required to consult on colour and remediate when they leave?

If a renter can paint a wall a colour they like, let's say Red, can do it themselves, then is it the landlords cost to restore it? If it was done badly, that could be quite expensive.

sir1963

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#2654484 11-Feb-2021 10:51

networkn:

One thing I am curious about, with the new changes...

The ability for renters to now paint if they wish, are there specific rules around what colour, if they require to meet a particular standard of painting, use appropriate paint for the surface, and if they are required to consult on colour and remediate when they leave?

If a renter can paint a wall a colour they like, let's say Red, can do it themselves, then is it the landlords cost to restore it? If it was done badly, that could be quite expensive.

"Minor Changes"... what does that mean ? Its so open to interpretation.

In Germany, you can paint it what ever you like BUT, it MUST be put back (properly) to how it was when you leave.

The bond is up to 3 months

There is no obligation to have a kitchen, its up to the tenant to install, and remove.

Minor maintenance is also the tenants responsibility.

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