Yeah it's the first part of what you said. Anyone with experience renting in NZ as a young person will know how common dodgy landlords dubiously claiming bonds are.

On your second point, it's not so strange if you recognise national are out for the minority of NZers that benefit from our status quo fucked housing situation. Their policy is extremely constrained by this fact (Labour too, but less so imo).

[–] Fizz 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I always lose my bond and I never damage the house. Its always $1500 of cleaning or some bullshit.

[–] luthis 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Tribunal man. Dont let them get away with that

[–] Fizz 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've been to tribunal twice and I'm 100% convinced they always side with the landlord.

[–] Dave 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I just had a peruse through the list of tribunal outcomes here: https://forms.justice.govt.nz/search/TT/

I searched for outcomes in June 2023.

Mostly they are landlords taking the tenants to the tribunal, but there are lots of tenants taking the landlord to the tribunal and there are many that are successful.

Unfortunately the data is in a pretty crap format (you have to open each PDF to work out anything) but it seems you've just been unlucky (or had a lack of evidence). There are enough successful tenants in the list that I wouldn't diisuade anyone from doing it. But for sure you need to make sure you take photos when you move in, of everything inside and out.

[–] Fizz 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I take photos when I move in but lose them by the time I move out. I'm genuinely really surprised it's not mostly landlords cleaning house. They must have really been in the wrong.

[–] Dave 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Oh don't get me wrong, there's loads of landlords winning, but generally this seems to be where the landlord is the one that initiated the proceedings. When the tenant initiated, they seem to win.

This isn't surprising, you wouldn't take someone to the tribunal unless they were in the wrong, so you'd expect the applicant to win most of the time. And this doesn't prove whether, for example, the tribunal is more likely to side with the landlord if they start the proceedings - we can't really work that out because the data is in a really poor format. I guess if you had hours of free time you would hand-transcribe the data to work it out, but I don't have that kind of time or patience.