After Jenai Ellen Tomlinson moved into her Melbourne flat last year, she discovered it had a serious mould problem.
When the mould began spreading across the walls in June, she emailed her property manager. After the power cut out, her property manager sent an electrician, who found water in the main switch box.
It took until October for the mould to be treated professionally, after multiple emails between the tenant, the agent, the body corporate and the mould treatment company.
“My bathroom door was so rusted I couldn’t even close it,” Tomlinson says. “I lost all my personal belongings, all my furniture, everything. It was really bad.”
But within months, the mould returned. Tomlinson messaged the agent in January and told them she was moving out.
The apartment is now back on the market for $320 a week, $60 more than Tomlinson had been paying.
Renters across Australia say they are moving out of unsafe or unsatisfactory properties, or being evicted, only to see the homes go back on the market for a higher rate once they leave.
With rising rents, diminishing vacancies and limited legal protections, many find themselves left with few options.
The agent for Tomlinson’s former home says the current market “justifies the very fair price it was re-advertised for”.
They say any leaks that may have caused the mould have been fixed and the property was “professionally mould treated, cleaned and repainted with mould-resistant paint before any open inspections or new tenants had moved in”.
Tomlinson has now moved back to Perth to live with family, saying she is “over” Melbourne’s heated rental market.
‘Technically, we’re still homeless’
She is far from the only tenant who has left a property in unhappy circumstances, only to discover it has been put back on the market at a higher rent. Last December, Claudine Keady was told she had to leave her four-bedroom property in Logan, Queensland, because the landlord wanted to move back in.
A month after Keady and her three daughters, then aged 17, 19 and 22, were evicted, she saw it on realestate.com.au for $500 a week – $100 more than she had been paying.
Keady’s rent had already gone up $20 in the past 12 months – Queensland law allows landlords to increase rent only once a year.
After being evicted she lived in her car with her youngest daughter and two cats, and then in a shed, until her former husband said they could live with him in Sydney.
“I want to save as much money as possible so that when I do find a rental, I can offer minimum three months – a lot of people are doing that,” she says. “Because, technically, we’re still homeless.”
Tom, who did not want his real name used, found asbestos in the backyard of his home in the Sydney suburb of Strathfield – which he confirmed through tests – and mould in the bathroom.
“I was then told [by the property manager] I should vacate the premises as the ‘landlord cared about my health’, only for them to up the rent $50 a week and take other tenants in once I’d moved out,” Tom says.
Tom moved close by and decided to tell the new tenants about the asbestos. They told him they had signed only a six-month lease as the house was due to be demolished, but had not been told about any asbestos, he says.
“I don’t understand how you can sleep at night having someone in a property knowing that there are all these problems with it,” he says.
‘A bad-faith approach to renting’
Advocates say the fundamental problem is that landlords can legally evict tenants without a reason.
Leo Patterson Ross of the Tenants’ Union of NSW says he has heard from an increasing number of tenants who have been given a no-grounds eviction, only to find the apartment subsequently listed for more.
“Sometimes the agents are banking on the rent bidding happening,” Patterson Ross says, referring to potential tenants offering more in rent in a bid to secure a place in the heated rental market. The NSW government has proposed legislation to end secret rent bidding, but advocates say disclosing higher offers could have the perverse effect of driving rents even higher.
“They might think that the tenant might be able to cope with the increase but not keep up with a bidding process, or they might be assessing that the tenant’s income isn’t sufficient to pay that rent.
“It’s a bad-faith approach to renting. But it’s enabled because of no-grounds evictions.”
Patterson Ross wants to see stronger protections for renters to stop agents evicting tenants for no reason.
The practice is legal in most parts of Australia, with the ACT having the strongest protections for tenants after it removed all forms of tenancy termination without reason in 2022.
In Queensland, Tasmania and Victoria, no-fault evictions are banned except at the end of the first fixed term. In NSW the practice is legal, but there is cross-party support to outlaw it.
“In [Queensland, Victoria and NSW], fair and reasonable eviction rules need to be implemented so that other parts of the system can work as the government intends,” Patterson Ross says.
“The big problem with no-grounds evictions is that they undermine anything else that government has tried to implement in renting rules because renters are the main people who have to enforce tenancy law.”
