Dr Chris Martin, Senior Research Fellow in the City Futures Research Centre at UNSW, is available for comment.
Dr Martin’s research interests include rental housing and housing affordability, with special interest in: tenancy law; the private rental market and related institutions; housing policy and intergovernmental relations.
He has led and participated in numerous inquiries and research projects for the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI), the Australian Research Council (ARC) and other research funders.
Dr Martin was previously the Senior Policy Officer of the Tenants' Union of NSW, and is the author of the 'Tenants' Rights Manual' (4th edition), the leading text on tenancy law and policy for tenants and community workers in New South Wales. He is also a past Chair of Shelter NSW.
Dr Martin can be contacted at [email protected] or +61 407 065 760
Statement that can be attributed to Dr Martin.
On dropping the rent-bidding element of the legislation: The Bill wasn’t going to encourage rental bidding – that already happens, especially in tight rental markets. And the withdrawal of the rental bidding parts of the Bill are not going to stop rental bidding from happening. Applicants will keep making higher offers, especially when markets are highly pressured, as now.
The Bill would have required landlords and agents to disclose an acceptable applicant’s higher offer to other applicants. As the government said, it was seeking to stop ‘secret rental bidding’ – and the Bill was directed to the ‘secret’ part.
If anything, the requirement to disclose a higher offer might have worked as a bit of a disincentive to applicants to make higher offers.
Aside from the disclosure requirement, the Bill would have stopped landlords and third parties from advertising rent ranges and soliciting higher offers, in the same way real estate agents were stopped last year. It would be a shame if those reforms did not go ahead.
Dr Martin's submission re Residential Tenancies Amendment (Rental Fairness) Bill 2023 is attached.
On transferrable bonds: The Bill before Parliament does not set out the details of the scheme, but a proposal has been discussed by NSW Fair Trading and stakeholders. This would allow tenants to effectively lodge the bond for their new tenancy using a ‘provisional certificate’ backed by the bond for their old tenancy (and if the new bond amount is higher, the tenant would pay the difference in cash). Then, when the old tenancy ends, the bond pays out the provisional certificate – and if any of it is paid to the old landlord, the tenant again has to make up the difference in cash. All this happens in the first few months of the new tenancy, when there’s unlikely to be any cause for the bond to be claimed by the new landlord. It seems to me to be a neat fix for the cashflow problem tenants often experience between tenancies.
Contact details:
Dr Martin, Senior Research Fellow, City Futures Research Centre UNSW
or +61 407 065 760