Tales from the Tenancy Tribunal: Healthy Homes hiccups

Tuesday, 7 January 2025

Landlords stand to be pinged if they don’t have a bare minimum in heating, drainage, ventilation, insulation and draught-stoppage, as a slew of cases through the Tenancy Tribunal this year showed.

Many landlords celebrated the coalition government’s election in late 2023, with mortgage interest deductibility, no-cause evictions and reduced notice periods a cause for property investors to cheer.

However, despite promising in the past to get rid of them, and not supporting them when they became law in 2019, the constituent parts of the coalition government have agreed to retain the Healthy Homes standards, which introduce specific and minimum standards for heating, insulation, ventilation, moisture ingress and drainage, and draught stopping in rental properties.

To put it another way, rental properties must have a fixed source of heating, functioning water pipes, and insulation where possible, and extractor fans in bathrooms and kitchens, among other things.

Edgecumbe House, Tauranga, where 17 tenants lived in substandard conditions.

But cases seen in the Tenancy Tribunal this year suggest the standards, as modest as they may seem to many, are still too much for some landlords.

In perhaps one of the biggest decisions of the year, in April a Tauranga boarding house with no hot water taps, cooking facilities or heating in the main living room was forced to pay 17 tenants $37,000 in damages for not complying with healthy homes standards.

Residents of the 21-bedroom house were mostly made up of ex-prisoners on parole or the homeless requiring emergency housing. All were concerned that raising any issues could cause them to lose their home.

In a different case in Hastings, a ramshackle house suffering unduly from problems linked back to Cyclone Gabrielle caused its renters to also suffer.

The landlord had clearly tried to get the home up to the standards dictated by Healthy Homes, including fixing guttering, properly plugging gaps in window frames, and seeing to ventilation. But he had failed to properly ventilate the place, leading to it being damp and mouldy, and of more concern was the general state of dilapidation of the property.

Cyclone Gabrielle took its toll on many houses - red-stickering some but leaving others with leaks.

The list of problems with the property include dry rot in exterior cladding, deteriorated window joinery and badly flaking paint, rot in interior and exterior sills and dislodged putty around windows, and a large hole in the bathroom ceiling giving access from a previous vent into the roof cavity was left uncovered for much of the tenancy. Being caught in the eye of Cyclone Gabrielle had not helped the issue of a leaking roof and mould around the property.

Still, as the adjudicator said, “it seems apparent to me from the evidence that the landlord was responsive to concerns raised by the tenant about the need for repair to the premises, as shown by the large number of contractor call outs to the property. For that reason, I do not find the grounds for an award of exemplary damages proved …again though, even if the landlord was responsive to the need for repair of the premises, if the tenants’ use and enjoyment of the premises was lessened due to ongoing repair or maintenance issues with the premises, compensation is due.”

A total of $1,853.00 was payable to the tenants.

In a different case concerning a flat in Epsom, the landlord admitted the Healthy Homes standards had been breached.

Specifically, the flat breached the heating and ventilation standards. The heating standard requires landlords to provide one or more ‘qualifying heaters’, with a capacity to heat the room to a required level. The ventilation standard sets out minimum expectations around windows and doors, and in particular the area of doors and windows that are openable. The standard also requires that each kitchen and bathroom have extractor fans installed with a minimum defined extraction capacity.

“The property should have complied with the HHS by 28 April 2024 and so for nearly two months the tenants were paying for a HHS compliant property that did not comply” the adjudicator found.

The property manager was ordered to pay the tenants $1,520.44.

Sometimes, even when landlords do everything right and actively fix problems, they fall afoul of the Tenancy Tribunal, as found in another case involving a Waitākere property.

In this case, the landlords significantly renovated the house prior to the tenancy’s commencement, spending about $50,000 on a full renovation of the kitchen, painting the interior, and refurbishing the bathroom. The landlords had also commissioned a comprehensive Healthy Homes Standards (HHS) report, which picked up only one minor issue - an excessive gap in the laundry window, which it fixed.

While the landlord understandably believed itself to be fully compliant with the rules, the tenants experienced excessive draughts and could not get the heat pump to work. Later work found that as many as 10 windows had had excessive gaps of between about 3 to 10 millimetres and the heat pump’s external unit was malfunctioning. The fact one of the tenants suffered from allergies meant the window gaps were a problem in both good and bad weather.

The landlords offered compensation to the tenants, acknowledging they had fallen short of the standards, but this was rebuffed.

The tenants were awarded as compensation for the draught and the faulty heat pump a total of $1,759.57.

The final noteworthy case from the Tenancy Tribunal involves a complex situation in which a landlord was absent for several weeks, claims of interference in the privacy of tenants, of unauthorised entry, illegal rent increases and plenty more besides.

Some of the above was awarded in favour of the tenants and conversely, the landlord received money for rent arrears and some damage. But the biggest win for the tenants involved claims that the property did not comply with Healthy Homes standards.

Among other things, the home was non-compliant on insulation, heating. moisture ingress and drainage, draught stopping, and non compliant with requirements in respect of smoke alarms , noting “…there is no smoke alarm, need to install 3 to have all units within 3 metres of each bedroom door.”

The landlord said there had always been compliant smoke alarms in the premises that must have been removed by the tenants before the assessment (which was done well into the tenancy, but premises have some time before they need to be compliant if they are older).

While the adjudicator did not believe generally believe the landlord had been intentionally in breach of her various obligations, and there were some mitigating factors from the tenants, the judge made one award of exemplary damages under the Healthy Homes lack of compliance, “noting that there were several [breaches].”

He ordered the tenants paid $3,500.00 in exemplary damages for the breach of Healthy Homes obligations.