Pet Friendly Landlords

The Animal Welfare League Australia is running a competition to find Australia's most pet friendly landlord. You can find out more and nominate landlords here: 

We'd like to make our own nomination - the NSW Land and Housing Corporation. 

For many years they have had the practice of allowing pets as standard. Their agreement currently states it as:

KEEPING OF PETS
38. The landlord agrees 
38.1 subject to any by-law applicable under clause 33* prohibiting pets, that the tenant may keep pets in the residential premises if the pets do not interfere with the reasonable peace comfort and/or privacy of neighbours.
38.2 The tenant agrees to remove any pet within 48 hours where in the reasonable opinion of the landlord the pet is not suitable to be kept on the premises and the landlord gives the tenant written notice to that effect
38.3 Clauses 38.1 and 38.2 do not apply to restricted dogs as defined by the Companion Animals Act 1998 or dogs declared as dangerous pursuant to that Act. The tenant must not keep any such dogs on the premises

Essentially, Housing leave the decision of whether to own a pet up to the tenant. This is only reasonable, as tenants are people who can make their own decisions, and be held accountable for that decision later in the event damage is caused or cleaning is required. The middle clause has given some tenants of the Land and Housing Corporation a little problem where the reasonable opinion of the landlord might be called into question- for instance, where neighbours and council have no issue with a dog but particular staff of the landlord do. In general however it is so far above the standard practice of other landlords it can be held up as the most reasonable approach to pets in rental we've seen in NSW.

If you've had a great experience with your landlord supporting your pet ownership, do consider letting the Animal Welfare League know.

Read more about this aspect of our Just Renting platform.

Great tenant-detectives competition: a winner is announced

We recently asked readers of the Brown Couch – and crime fiction – to identify literature's great tenant-detectives (other than Sherlock Holmes, who is already known as the very worst tenant in London).

Please assemble in the parlour for the announcement of the winner...

Congratulations to Helen S, who identified not one but two great tenant detectives: Kinsey Millhone, from Sue Grafton's 'Alphabet' series of novels –

– and Stephanie Plum, from Janet Evanovich's numerical 'Plum' series.

Tough, resourceful, working against the odds: these two are exemplary tenant-detectives.

Honorable mentions to:

• Anonymous, for Dashiell Hammett's Sam Slade;
• PM, for Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe; and
• Peter S, for Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret.

Helen S gets a copy of Ruth Rendell's landlord-tenant thriller, '13 Steps Down'. Thanks for playing!

Competition: the great tenant-detectives

Competition time.

The recent passing of the great detective novelist P D James got us thinking back to our very first tenancy culture study, in which we considered the case of Sherlock Holmes: the 'very worst tenant in London', and a terrible flatmate to poor old Dr Watson. We noted briefly that Holmes was but the first in a literary tradition of tenant-detectives.

(P D James (right) and Ruth Rendell)

So the challenge we put to you, dear reader, is: identify another tenant-detective in fiction and tell us why being a tenant is significant to the character (a few words will suffice, or go for a full-length tenancy culture study, if you like).

The prize for the best entry: a copy of '13 Steps Down', the landlord-tenant murder thriller by Ruth Rendell, contender for James's title as reigning Queen of Crime and, previously, Vice President of Shelter (England).  

Send your entry to us by email [tunsw@clc.net.au], private message on Facebook, fax, postcard, letter written in invisible ink, mysterious message written in fog on a bathroom mirror, or what have you. Entries close midnight Saturday 31 January.

Get reading!

[UPDATE 16 January: news has just been released that Ruth Rendell has had a stroke. We wish her well – she's our favourite crime writer-housing activist. The tenant-detective competition proceeds.]

Tenancy Haiku

We're always on the lookout for creative ways to express ourselves here on the Tenants' Union's Brown Couch - and this week we thought it would be fun to try our hand at Haiku.

Here's one from Chris:

Section 10

Sharing a house with

A named tenant. We shook hands -

I'm out in the cold.

...and here's my own attempt:

Home for life

Written into law,

No aspiration of home.

No change comes with spring.

***

We'd love to see what others can come up with - why not give it a go?

If you're so inclined, Tweet your Haiku or post it on Facebook. Mention us, and we'll share it on.

If you drop us a line with your contact details, we'll also give you one of our fabulous 'Tenants Make Cities' shirts for your trouble.

There's no such thing as a free shirt

We're a gracious lot here at the Brown Couch. As a way of saying 'thanks' for your continued support of the work of the Tenants' Advice & Advocacy Services and the Tenants' Union of NSW, we'd like to give away a couple of T-shirts.

We don't have many. As much as we'd like to, we can't just give them out to anybody who wants one. Instead, we've come up with a bit of a game - play the game, and you can have a free shirt.

It's a pretty simple game. Here's how it works:

We're going to pretend that we've got a situation where some rising damp is causing an internal wall to blister and peel. At first it just looked like a coat of paint would fix it, but it's pretty obvious now that more than that will be required.

The landlord has said they'd fix it, but they don't really seem that concerned about it. From our own inspections, we can see that this wall has been patched up before…

We're sure the landlord ought to do more this time. How can we get them to fix it properly?

***

Answer this question

- Or -

Tell us about a time when you asked for your landlord to fix something

- Or -

Tell us what you would change to make asking your landlord to fix something less of an ordeal

… and we'll send you a shirt.

***

All answers need to be left as comments on this blog.

Feel free to answer anonymously, but in order to get your shirt, you'll also need to contact us so we can get one to you in the correct size. The best way to do that is by Facebook or Twitter, but if you're not on the social pages you can always contact us by more traditional means.

... and now, here's a word from our competition winner

Regular readers will know of our good friend Leo, who won the coveted prize of a copy of "Pacific Heights" on DVD for his near-enough speculation in the Brown Couch guessing game a few months back... Leo managed to come within a whisker of the correct answer to the question: how many private tenancies were established under the Residential Tenancies Act 1987? (I've always assumed it was just a good guess, and not some kind of calculated wizardry that we should all be momentarily in awe of...)

Anyway, it's clear that Leo is capable of more than the occasional wild stab in the dark. Much more. Because no sooner than the postie had delivered this grand prize to Leo's door, he's popped it straight onto the plasma with pencil and notepad in hand, to look upon it with a critical eye. There wasn't even time to make popcorn.




... and so the Brown Couch welcomes Leo to the podium, to discuss "Pacific Heights". Talk us through it, Leo. What's it all about?



Leo PR: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you... What a great audience...
You know, if all the bad tenants in the US were to sharehouse together and after a couple of months were asked who amongst them was the worst tenant of all, that bad tenant would not be Carter Hayes. This isn’t because the other tenants wouldn’t have voted for him, it’s because everyone else would have left or been beaten into submission.

Michael Keaton’s portrayal is still being used by real estate agents around the world to demonstrate the pitfalls involved when choosing tenants. But it’s really more a tale of the dangerous lengths and risks people will take to own their own home.

In an apt parable of Australia’s attitudes towards renting, this malevolent force is actually an aspirational home owner and investor himself. Taking advantage of Frisco’s lack of a low-cost adjudication system he moves in to a house with the protection of supposedly tenant-friendly laws and a slow, expensive eviction system. In the words of the landlord’s attorney “the net effect of these laws is to protect any pointy-headed cretin who moves into your property and slowly drives you bankrupt and insane.” Landlords in NSW should be so lucky!

The aim of his game is to drive the landlords into bankruptcy and snap up the property at massively reduced prices.

Post-beetlejuice, mid-batman Keaton, pre-Antonio Griffiths and what-else-has-he-been-in-again Modine all do fine jobs in their roles. Keaton handles the shift between sociable and respectable yuppie and creepy psycho very well, clearly his role in Batman had honed that skill.

Modine's character is no angel himself, proving to be his own worst enemy by managing to break almost every rule in whatever book you happen to be using. With some serious anger management issues he was the perfect target for our antagonist’s plots and destroys any sympathy you might have had for him by petulantly exploding with rage any time he doesn’t get what he wants.

Melanie Griffiths provides the true victim between her tenant and live-in partner, pitching herself nicely as a young, naive but ultimately decent person. The final revenge sequence is one of the only properly well-directed sequences in the film.

The movie itself is a mishmash. I don’t know if I’ve been innured by hundreds of hours of violent video games, Marilyn Manson and the Saw movies but as a thriller the film fell flat. Perhaps you need to be a landlord to truly appreciate the scariness of that staple of yuppie horror stores... a baaaad tenant.

All told, a dated, ocassionally sloppy and amateurishly symbolic but nevertheless enjoyable argument against debt. Of course, these intrepid landlords still want to make good on their investments. They list the property at 20% more than they paid only 6 months before, and suck another young couple into a mortgage they can ill afford.

In Hollywood, as in all good fiction, the good guys always seem to win in the end.

And the winner is...

And now, the answer to our quiz:

How many private market tenancies have been created under the soon-to-be-repealed Residential Tenancies Act 1987 (NSW)?

The envelope please, Dr Mowbray...

... and the answer is 5.7 million, which means Brown Couch reader Leo PR is the winner!




Leo's guess – 5.5 million – is just 3.5 per cent off the right answer (as determined by Dr Mowbray and the good people who prepare the Rent and Sales Report), which makes him both a very canny judge of the private rental market in New South Wales and a very worthy winner of our prize, a copy of the 1990 horror-story-for-landlords, Pacific Heights.

Congratulations Leo, and thanks everyone for playing.

Pop quiz: part 2

Now, the mathematics section, courtesy of Brown Couch reader and tenancy legend, Robert Mowbray.

Q. With the new Residential Tenancies Act 2010 (NSW) to commence soon, the old Residential Tenancies Act 1987 (NSW) will be repealed. In its 21 years of operation, how many private market tenancies have been created under the 1987 Act?

Good question, Dr Mowbray!

Like all good tenant advocates, Dr Mowbray never asks a question without already knowing the answer, and he has shared the answer with the Brown Couch. We won't share it with you yet, however; first, we'd like to hear your guesses.

And in a first for the Brown Couch, there's a prize for the closest guess: a DVD of the tenurially significant 1990 landlord-tenant horror-thriller, Pacific Heights.

('They wanted a tenant in the worst way. And that's what they got.')

Send your guess to us in the comments, or by email, by 31 October. One guess per person, please.

And so we're clear, the number we're taking as the answer is the number of rental bonds lodged over the period from the first quarter of 1990 (remember, the 1987 Act did not commence until late in 1989) to the June quarter of 2010 (or as close as we can get to the present date).

(A true pedant might object that bonds lodged does not equal tenancies commenced, because a few landlords wrongly don't lodge bonds, and a very few don't ask for them. If your guess is backed by a better method of approximation than our's, let us know.)

Get guessing!