Family Call For Tougher Laws Vs Bad Tenants After Their Home was Trashed by Renters

A family has called for tougher laws to crackdown on bad tenants after their home was trashed and they lost thousands of dollars in unpaid rent.

Casey, who refused to use her last name, lived across the road from her mother’s Cooloongup house where the “tenants from hell” rented. “I told Mum there was rubbish and graffiti out the front and a lot of people coming and going,” she said.

Her mother, Debra was shocked to arrive at the property on Monday to discover it completely trashed with dog wastes, children’s toys, drug paraphernalia, food waste and other rubbish scattered over the four-bedroom home. “When they moved in they seemed like decent people. I don’t know how anyone can live like that,” she said.

Debra then posted images of the house on a Facebook page asking for help to clean up the mess. She then discovered that she was not the only landlord to fall victim to bad tenants. “After seeing how many people were in the same boat, it seems like an epidemic,” she said.

Debra said that because of the current low demand for rental properties in WA, she said landlords were at the mercy of bad tenants since they could choose what rented property they pick. “We are in a bind, we can’t sell it because we can’t get back what we paid for it,” she said.

Commerce Minister Michael Mischin said the Residential Tenancies Act aims to balance the rights and responsibilities of landlords and their tenants. “It is a term of every residential tenancy agreement that a tenant shall keep the premises in a reasonable state of cleanliness and shall not intentionally or negligently cause or permit damage to the premises,” he said.

Under the act, if a tenant fails to meet these obligations, landlords can issue a breach notice requiring a tenant to remedy the breach, and if a tenant fails to do so within 14 days, a landlord can give a notice terminating the tenancy agreement, allowing the tenant at least seven days to vacate the premise, but if a tenant fails to vacate, the landlord must get a court order.

Source: Au.news.yahoo.com