Moving out of your parents' place and into a share house isn't supposed to be easy.
There's always that one housemate who never does the washing up, or some weird friend of the house who's always over - negotiating house rules with people who aren't your family for the first time is a rite of passage.
But, subleases can also open up a vast web of lesser-known laws and regulations that leave renters with fewer rights.
In today's housing crisis, young people have little choice but to accept exploitative housing arrangements.
Lekh Bhatia moved from Abu Dhabi to study maths at Australian National University in January 2022.
His first share house was a world of pain. But, without a lease, he felt he had no recourse to action.
There was a dead animal smell every time he used the kitchen, he wasn't allowed to buy furniture for an empty living room and the place was perpetually freezing because the landlord refused to fix a broken window - also in the living room.
"Her reasoning was that actually, it's a living room. Like, 'You guys don't need the living room, it's not an essential space'," says Mr Bhatia.
When he ordered a lamp from IKEA, he started to wonder if his landlord, who lived in a separate house on the same property, was spying on him.
"She's messaging me like, 'Why are you getting a lamp'?" says Mr Bhatia.
It soon escalated to messages questioning why he was having friends stay over.
"It just made me feel awful," he says.
"I would start telling people to be mindful and check before you come in and out."
The 18-year-old, who grew up in Sydney, had tried to find a place with a lease.
After missing out on ANU's guaranteed on campus housing for first semester students (COVID had forced him to study online for his first semester), Mr Bhatia teamed up with another student to apply for apartments through real estate agencies, only to give up after more than a dozen unsuccessful applications.
It was this experience that made him stay in the share house for a year.
According to Better Renting, an organisation that campaigns for stronger rental laws, even without a written lease the normal protections for tenants still apply.
But if the landlord lives at the same property, it's a different story.
Rather than tenants, renters in these situations are classed as occupants and their landlords as grantors.
Occupants have weaker protections.
"I think it's just a real gap between what people think they're signing up for and then how weak protections are in reality," says Joel Dignam, executive director of Better Renting.
He said while tenants can take their landlords to the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal if major repairs don't get done within four weeks, if they're occupants, the place only needs to be kept in a "reasonable state of repair".
It's also easier to evict occupants.
But the most common complaint Better Renting hears from occupants is controlling behaviour from landlords.
"They can observe your life because they're living on the same property," says Mr Dignam.
"There's much more temptation to try to police what you cook, when you cook, how much electricity you use, what guests you have, whether you can have parties or things like that."
The law only says the rules have to be in writing and "reasonable".
But it's not all bad news.
The ACT government recently closed a consultation about bringing the protections for occupants closer to the ones tenants enjoy.
One renter, who did not wish to be named, tells The Canberra Times being able to evict her housemates is a safety measure.
As a student in her 30s who has been living in share houses for over 10 years, she's been in her fair share of situations where housemates have made her feel unsafe.
Now she has a traditional tenancy agreement with her landlord, while her housemates are occupants and she's their grantor.
"When you enter a share house, you're basically entering into a relationship with a complete stranger," she says.
"[A]t the end of the day, if someone makes me feel unsafe, I can ask them to leave."
Mr Dignam has some sympathy for people who want to control who they live with.
"I think the lesson for all people, and it is a bit harder in a tight rental market, is just to ... do what you can to be sharing a home with people that is going to make a positive experience," he says.
Lekh Bhatia moved out of his share house in February 2023 and has been living in one of ANU's residential colleges since then.
"There are still things that are not great but at least everyone's experiencing this and ... there's still a power that can be held accountable," he says.
