The Problem with Property Managers
My original idea was to write a feature on Dunedin’s worst landlord. But throughout the interview process, one thing soon became startlingly apparent: of those who responded to the Critic Facebook status and agreed to be interviewed, almost all had been dealing not with landlords, but with property managers.The Role of the Property Manager
I got in touch with Steven Sharp, owner of the Letting Centre and, according to his website, a realtor with 20 years’ experience in his field. I asked him to comment on the role of the property manager: “[a] property manager … is either a company or a person [who] takes over the function of being the agent for the owner of a property. We become a bit like the ‘meat in the sandwich,’ if you like – we keep the owner happy and the tenant happy in the property. We enter the tenants into a tenancy agreement [which] is governed by the Residential Tenancy Act in terms of what is expected of tenants and what landlords must deliver.”Sharp continued: “the property manager has all the rights and privileges of a landlord – tenants can inform us and let us know if something needs fixing, and it’s our job to fix that as quickly as possible for them … It can be awkward for a property manager [when], for example, a tenant may request ‘x’ but the owner’s saying ‘no, I don’t want to pay for that.’”
10A Jetty Street
This tension is all too familiar to a former tenant of 10a Jetty Street. From the start of the tenancy, the seven-room property plagued the tenants with constant leaks. The landlord, Graeme Crosbie, has owned the building for 18 years and was aware of the problem, though in correspondence he asserted that “exceptional rainfall in early August brought major leaks from areas where none had been before.”The former tenants’ account of the problem conjures to mind that scene from Jumanji when a monsoon takes place indoors. “The leaks were all over the flat, inside and outside our rooms, lounge, open areas and kitchen. One room had a whole wall covered in water streaming down it – the other side of the same wall housed our switchboard. Leaks even came through the light fittings in our kitchen. This resulted in a lot of mould all over the place.”
Property manager Christina Booth from Flat Out Accommodation was unsuccessful in her (presumed) attempts to get landlord Crosbie to remedy the leaks once and for all, which, according to the handyman Crosbie hired to undertake never-ending piecemeal patch-ups, required replacing the roof altogether. Instead of a roof, however, the tenants got a skylight (though Crosbie denies this), which allegedly also leaked.
Compounding the problem, the handyman would come over often “at random times and leave all his tools. Our home looked like a construction site.” Anyone who has hosted a tradesman knows that one time can be a mild inconvenience, but the endless stream of such visits ultimately proved intolerable for the tenants of 10a Jetty Street who, in the end, just told the landlord to “stop bothering.”
The former tenants suspected that this request was playing right into Crosbie’s plan; they claimed that it seemed he wanted to “wind out the process out long enough so that in the end we would give up on chasing them up.” Crosbie disagrees, arguing the situation was more complex than it appeared at face value. “Some leaks have been difficult to pinpoint as they would not leak with every rain event, giving the impression that the problem had been dealt with,” he said. “[But] the issue seemed to escalate in the last 18 months or so.”
Indeed, according to the former tenant, “the tenants there this year have publicly claimed on Facebook that the leak situation is still going and have given the impression that the landlord had not made any steps to repair the ongoing problems because they’re too expensive.” This is despite the fact the lease ran for 11 months, giving Crosbie one month per year to address these problems before new tenants moved in. Crosbie claims he did in fact utilise this period for extensive maintenance and repairs.
Despite the prolonged correspondence, the tenants of 10a Jetty St were only partially remunerated for the inconvenience and the costs of the industrial heaters required to fight the damp, and were unsuccessful in their quest for a rent reduction. Correspondence from Crosbie reads, “the rent being paid was happily agreed to when you all signed up for the apartment.”
“If we had known the problems before signing the lease and moving in,” the tenants explained, “we would not have chosen to live here.”
171A Dundas Street
Though only three property managers out of a total of six who were emailed chose to exercise their right of reply, a common theme amongst the responses was the drastic difference in facts, which often reached the point of total irreconcilability. Take the case of 171a Dundas Street. A former tenant began his list of problems with his former property manager by mentioning, good-naturedly, that upon arrival “there was a dildo sitting on the bench.”Other problems included an upstairs cupboard “completely full of rubbish” that attracted rats, which their property manager, Jenny Martin (manager of the OUSA “Worst Flat” of 2010), allegedly left to the former tenants to clean out. When this didn’t happen, the tenant I spoke to claimed Martin “had the cheek to come back and say she wanted rubbish removed from [the] cupboard or they would have to pay $500 out of [their] bond.”
Within minutes of sending Martin the former tenant’s statement for comment, I had received three phone calls from her. Although the story was corroborated by another former tenant, Martin vehemently denied what shall henceforth be referred to as Dildogate, but failed to comment (though asked repeatedly for a written statement by way of e-mail so as to protect Critic’s reputation for journalistic accuracy), on the other legitimate concerns raised by the tenant.
Instead, Martin gave me the number of two tenants who had lived at 171a Dundas Street in the two years prior to the tenants to whom I had spoken. Jack Gavin assured me they had no problems with either Martin or the flat, and that, with regards to the cupboard o’ rubbish, the aggrieved tenants in question “sound like pussies.” However, when I explained to Gavin that the issue was not so much the cupboard as the threatened bond deduction, the line fell silent.
System Failure
This anecdotal evidence appears to reflect the systemic nature of the problem with property managers. It seems intuitive that, given how difficult it can apparently be to negotiate even the simplest repairs in a bilateral relationship between tenant and landlord, adding one more person into the mix only serves to complicate matters further. There is a whole extra hurdle to overcome when it comes to communication, personalities and time.Almost all of the tenants I interviewed felt that dealing directly with a landlord would have yielded better and more timely results rather than going through a property manager, given that landlords (theoretically) have a vested interest in their properties, both emotionally and financially. Property managers, on the other hand, can claim their commission and be on their merry way, having appeared to do the bare minimum. After all, when a property manager assures a tenant that they have done their best to negotiate with a landlord on your behalf (which, by the way, is not them doing you a favour – it’s their job), the tenant must largely take their word for it. The power imbalance inherent in the property manager-tenant relationship allows little room for such questioning.
Whilst it seems like a good idea to have a property manager deal with the day-to-day in the case of non-professional landlords (that is to say, landlords with day jobs), ultimately the property manger is paid by a company who is paid by landlords. It is in the former’s interest to keep the latter happy. Thus, a property manager’s loyalties ultimately lie with the landlord, not the tenant.
The Grass Isn’t Always Greener: 279 Castle Street
However, the experience of the former tenants of 279 Castle Street would serve to enforce that which we all already knew – that landlordism is hardly a panacea for property management ills – and it is comforting to know that there are still plenty of atrocious landlords out there to hold their own against their property manager counterparts.When the tenants of the aforementioned flat were told their lounge was going to be turned into a seventh bedroom during the Easter holidays (after being assured they could still use it as a lounge and that the work would be complete upon their return), they were startled to come home to smashed walls and no carpet.
Months went by, and the flatmates had to use their kitchen as a lounge and a laundry, not to mention foot the bill for all the power the contractors had used. The tenants contacted the Housing Department for advice, who suggested – rather too late – that they should have gotten the landlord’s renovation intentions in writing before work had begun.
After a lengthy meeting, the landlord asked the tenants to suggest an appropriate form of compensation. Despite paying for, but being without, a lounge for the better part of six months, the tenants received just one week rent-free at the very end of the year.
What’s a student to do?
Those I interviewed wished they’d stood up for themselves more when dealing with their property managers, but at the time felt they lacked the time, energy or finances to be more assertive. However, the threat of a further deteriorating relationship and potentially withheld bond at the end of the year, and the fact that students rarely read their tenancy agreement properly or know their rights, conspired to make the tenants I interviewed feel as though kicking up more of a fuss just wasn’t worth it.Though awful, it is unlikely the reader has been all that surprised by the stories above. Through sheer repetition, we have become desensitised to the violation of our rights as tenants. Tenants have downplayed legitimate issues, indoctrinated by a Scarfie culture that takes masochistic pride in substandard housing and views it as a right of passage. Such an environment allows landlords to get maximum return on minimum input, so when students don’t speak up for themselves, they encourage and perpetuate these low-quality, high-cost living arrangements.
Should you find yourself in a situation similar to any or all of those detailed above, the OUSA Student Support Centre on Ethel Benjamin Place (across the road from the Central Library) should be your first point of call, not your last. Matt Tucker, manager of the Support Centre and a familiar friendly face around campus, laughs that “if no one put up with these flats, then we would have better, more interesting rights of passage than living in a crap house. I dunno what you learn from it.”
Tucker dispels the myth that dealing with problematic property managers (or landlords, for that matter) need take up much time or money, and strongly advises that students harness the power of the 14-day notice to spur those in charge of your flat into action. Indeed, a website is in the pipeline to smooth this process, but in the meantime, according to Tucker, “OUSA make it as easy as possible to file a 14-day notice. All property managers will have to respond because they know the consequences of not doing so.”
Tucker continues: “students needs to realise that OUSA is here to do the hard work – we require something of a partnership but you don’t have to wonder what you can or can’t do – we’re here to assist. It’s only $20 to file a complaint with the [Tenancy] Tribunal.” And at the end of the day, he says, “it’s worth it – it costs you nothing if you lose.”
The final word
My personal preference and behaviour thus far has been to steer clear of property managers altogether. (Indeed, once this wildly biased feature is published, I may no longer have a conscious choice with regards to this.) However, Tucker takes the view that since property managers are more likely to be aware of the intricacies of tenancy laws than some landlords, they will be more motivated to act on them. Thus, whether you choose landlord or property manager will probably remain, as it has always been, a consideration secondary to location, amenities and cost of rent.In saying this, although a certain degree of confirmation bias is acknowledged (as Tucker says, “you never hear about good property managers”), I couldn’t help feeling whilst interviewing for this feature that these stories were really only the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps we should all begin to take Tucker’s advice and, when asked for a reference by your prospective rent-taker, call their bluff and ask for their references, too.
