Property Investors Crucial

Earlier this week, the Northern Territory government passed
legislation that changed their tenancy laws enabling tenants to keep pets at
rental properties without seeking the owners’ consent. This was done despite a
parliamentary committee recommending that such provisions not be introduced.

This trend towards taking away the rights of property owners
across the country is worrying, not for landlords but for tenants.

How can that be I hear you ask? Well, any unreasonable laws
that disincentivise people from investing in residential property for rental
purposes leads to a shortening of supply, which inevitably leads to higher
rents.

When federal Labor sought to make dramatic changes to
negative gearing and Capital Gains Tax provisions last election, the real
estate industry fought against it. Bill Shorten dismissed our concerns as
predicated upon self-interest. The reality is the opposite. Agents who manage
property for landlords, benefit from increased rents because their management
fees are calculated as a percentage of the rent received.

Last year, CHOICE, National Shelter and The National
Association of Tenant Organisations jointly released a report that considered
the consumers’ experience of renting property in Australia. One of the report’s
key claims was that more than half of all tenanted properties needed repairs to
them and that most tenants felt insecure and were required to move from
tenancies more often than they’d have liked.

The report was an exercise in “landlord bashing”, an
increasingly popular pursuit from some sectors that consider personal aspiration
and wealth building as some sort of unjustifiable evil.

Obviously, it’s important to ensure all tenants are
protected by laws that ensure they are entitled to the quiet enjoyment of their
home, that essential maintenance and repairs are done well and quickly and that
those landlords that break those laws are held to account. Currently, the
Residential Tenancy laws in Western Australia work well; they are reasonably
well balanced and generally favour tenants.

The disturbing push from certain groups to further swing the
balance towards favouring tenants inevitably discourages property investment. Is
this the outcome the writers of the report are after predicated upon some sort
of ideological pursuit? Limiting property investment always – yes always – delivers
higher rents and less choice to tenants so what is it they hope to gain?

One major finding around tenants’ feelings of insecurity
around the short term nature of residential tenancies is, frankly, down to the
tenants themselves yet somehow
this has been “blamed” on the landlords. There are no laws preventing a
tenant seeking a longer-term lease.

Privately owned investment properties provide millions of
Australians essential and affordable (in WA renting is way more affordable than
home ownership) housing. Without those investors, governments will need to
provide those homes and in WA our government already has 14,000 people waiting
for them to be built.