Queensland’s peak real estate body has recommended property managers issue every tenant with a notice to leave at the same time as they are offered a new lease, as a way of circumventing the state’s new no-grounds eviction laws.
Renters who spoke to Guardian Australia criticised the recommendation, which they said has left them shocked and worried about their future.
The chief executive of the Real Estate Institute of Queensland (REIQ), Antonia Mercorella, said the new laws – to come into effect from October – left her organisation with “no choice” but to make the recommendation.
Mercorella said the reforms will make a lessor’s ability to end a periodic tenancy far harder because they will no longer be able to evict a tenant without grounds.
Unlike a fixed-term, which has a start and end to a lease, a periodic lease has no end date and is continued on a rolling basis.
As a result, REIQ’s “best practice” advice was to get tenants on to a fixed-term agreement and to issue a notice to leave the moment they are offered a new lease.
Mercorella said landlords who did not do so were at risk of missing the lease renewal deadline, defaulting into a periodic lease and ending up with a “tenant for life”.
“This is the absolute irony and frankly, the stupidity of these new laws, that a tenant under a periodic tenancy on the first of October will have greater certainty and greater stability than a tenant under a fixed-term tenancy,” she said. “It’s outrageous.”
Jacinta, her husband and two adult children were among those to receive a new lease alongside a notice to leave. In the new lease, the rent for their home in Ormeau, in south-east Queensland, went up by $140 to $580 a week.
“We started getting text messages, each family member, within seven days saying, ‘You haven’t signed your new lease,’” she said.
“Basically, you must sign and return that lease within 14 days, even though you still have eight weeks left on your lease. If you don’t sign, they will enforce the notice to leave.”
Jacinta has a medical condition that prevents her from working, but her husband and children are gainfully employed. She said the rent rise represented a “huge” hit to their budget.
“It’s, ‘what can you forgo to keep a roof over your head?” she said.
But with the housing market in crisis mode for renters, Jacinta’s family felt they had no choice but to take the hit.
Katie*, who lives in Caboolture, where she moved with her son to escape domestic violence, said she was asked to pay an additional $25 a week for her unit, which was enough of a blow to her budget that she decided she would move.
Katie said she felt unsafe where she lives, after her former partner found out where she was.
But with her son about to finish grade six and her lease due to expire October, she asked her landlord if she could start renting on a month-to-month basis to allow them to move out at the end of the year without disrupting her child’s schooling.
She was told, due to the rent reforms, she would not be offered such a lease.
The chief executive of Tenants Queensland, Penny Carr, said the REIQ’s advice was a “hysterical response” and “a tantrum”.
“It’s about keeping power and control over renters,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like this in over 20 years of working here.”
Carr said the REIQ is “thumbing their nose” at the Queensland government and “the spirit” of the rental reforms by seeking to retain the right to “arbitrary evictions”.
Mercorella said the tenants’ union was “spreading lies”.
“This is a witch-hunt against an organisation that forewarned all stakeholders that the changes to periodic tenancies were wrong,” Mercorella said.
*name has been changed
