Tenant finds himself on black list after fee squabble
Will Stuart, from Christchurch, says a disagreement with a property manager over a mysterious fee later came back to haunt him.
After renting a property in Riccarton for three years, his property manager asked for a $150 payment to renew the lease — a fee which had never been charged previously and was not included in the tenancy agreement.
“All they said was, ‘That’s the new policy, you have to pay it’,” he said. Complaints to the property manager and the landlord went nowhere.
After getting advice from staff at the Tenancy Tribunal, Stuart challenged the property manager’s company about the fee and it backed down. But that was just the start of the problem. A year later, when he was looking for a house, he was bemused when he was rejected by several landlords.
“We found that the places we were looking for, as soon as they got our references, they said, ‘We can’t let this to you’. I asked one why, and they said, ‘You’ve got bad references’.
“[The former property manager] was telling prospective landlords that we were troublemakers and that we would go to the Tenancy Tribunal willy-nilly just to get our own way. That’s what they did to us out of sheer spite.”
Stuart finally found another place to live after “begging” a landlord, though it was a run-down house which was set to be demolished in two years. He now owns his own home.
“In the four years we had been living [in the Riccarton flat] we never got told to clean up the house. One time we got a citation telling us we needed to do something about the garden and we paid $400 to get a gardener to do it.
“We’d given the landlord four years of good service, looked after the property, paid our rent on time. As a landlord, that’s all you really want. So to have the property manager get rid of some random tenants and then go through all that cost just doesn’t make sense for your investment.”