Rental advocates are warning about mass no-grounds evictions in New South Wales between now and the end of the year unless the state government acts to stop dodgy landlords.
Over the weekend, the state Labor government announced it would introduce legislation to stop no-grounds evictions in September. The NSW premier, Chris Minns, said he hoped it would be passed and come into effect by the start of 2025.
No-grounds evictions allow landlords to evict a tenant without giving any reason, even when the tenant has paid their rent on time, looked after the home and the landlord intends to keep renting out the property.
While the long-awaited reforms, which also include the introduction of a portable bond scheme, have largely been welcomed, there is concern about renters and investors.
While broadly supporting the move, the Tenants’ Union of NSW chief executive, Leo Patterson Ross, said the government needed to ensure renters were not booted from their homes in the next six months.
“We are concerned about the potential for evictions to occur before the legislation come into effect in order to avoid the legislation,” he said.
“That’s a live concern. We saw a similar phenomenon in Victoria when they did their reforms. This is something that the [NSW] government needs to be conscious of.”
He said there were options for transitional period protections, including giving the rental tribunal discretion to decline to terminate a lease if it appeared the eviction was not being served for one of the reasons outlined in the legislation.
Under the changes, landlords would only be able to end a lease if there were “reasonable grounds”, including if the home was damaged, needed renovation, the owners wanted to move back in or if a tenant was not paying.
Explaining the reforms on Monday, Minns said the state’s 2 million renters would be better off and he hoped it would help keep living in Sydney affordable.
“If we don’t do something about it, our best and brightest will leave,” he said.
He said penalties for landlords caught doing the wrong thing could not be nominal and treated as the “cost of doing business”, but that they had not been finalised.
Concerns about the impacts on renters over the next six months were echoed by the NSW Council of Social Service’s acting chief executive, Ben McAlpine, who mostly welcomed the reforms as a big step forward for the state.
“The situation for renters has been significantly unfair, and this will start to rebalance our housing system, to make it fairer,” he said.
Homelessness NSW’s chief executive, Dominique Rowe, said the no-grounds reforms were “sensible” but more was needed to “fix the broken housing market”.
She called on the government to spend $1bn a year for the next 10 years to double the proportion of social homes to take the pressure off rising rents, and to better regulate the short-term rental market.
The property sector has expressed concerns over the changes, with the state property council’s executive director, Katie Stevenson, flagging that “removing no-grounds evictions could mean fewer investors seeking to own and manage a long-term private rental property”.
She said that would lead to less rental stock on the market during a housing crisis.
“Small-scale mum and dad investors dominate the market in NSW, and the additional cost and uncertainty could mean they’ll simply sell up and remove vital rental homes from the market,” she said.
The opposition leader, Mark Speakman, pledged to closely examine the legislation but said it would not solve the housing crisis.
