The Joys of Property Management – VCAT

I was chatting to a Senior Property Manager friend this weekend about the joys of Property Management & she told me about a situation she had just had with a tenant. The tenant was being evicted for rent arrears & became increasingly abusive throughout the process. The warrant of possession was eventually obtained & the tenant elected to vacate the night before the warrant was to be actioned. When my friend went to carry out the final inspection she found a delightful little message written in the dirty pavers by the tenants just for her.

 We had a bit of a chuckle about the effort the tenant had gone to in order to really get his message across & I told her to let me know what happened at the VCAT hearing for the property the following week. She sent me the following email advising me how the hearing went this morning & gave me permission to share it with you, but has requested to remain anonymous.

“You would think that VCAT would learn some form of consistency in their orders, but alas it seems this is still not the case.

 This week I attended what I thought would be a fairly straight forward hearing. Difficult tenants who were evicted for rent arrears. I claimed most of the bond to cover rent arrears, steam cleaning costs (due to no receipt being provided despite numerous attempts to have this produced), VCAT application fees, registered post fees and paver cleaning. I anticipated that the rent and cleaning costs would be an easy one, while the fees would not be awarded – I have tried to claim the fees at owners’ requests in the past and the Member has always turned down flat.

 The Member heard both our sides and came up with the following order:

• Rent – awarded in full.
• VCAT application fee for 2 hearings – awarded at $39.50 each, and registered post costs awarded at 2x$5.00 registered post charges. This, in itself was quite a shock.
• Steam cleaning costs – not awarded as the tenant said he cleaned them. The receipt was unfortunately taken by aliens when he was abducted and probed. That’s obviously why he couldn’t produce the receipt.

 The most shocking part of the order was the paver cleaning. Now, call me crazy, but I thought this part was a no-brainer. The tenants were evicted for rent arrears. There were numerous abusive emails from the tenant to me about how unfair it was that I was going to evict him just because he didn’t pay his rent (the injustice of it all!).

 The tenants finally handed back keys overnight on a Tuesday at around 11pm. The final inspection was carried out Wednesday 10am & I discovered the lovely message demonstrating the tenants’ extensive vocabulary written on the dirty pavers. The Member who shall remain nameless asked the tenant if they did it.

 The response was “No”.

 The member then started reading out his order stating the cleaning cost would not be covered. At this point, I piped up and started firing up asking what grounds this decision was reached. The response was simply:

“Because he swore on the bible he didn’t do it”. Now, as shocked as I am his hand didn’t burst into flames when he swore himself in. I thought this was THE most ridiculous reason to base an order on! I started throwing questions at him like “Do we need cameras installed in each property to prove a tenant caused damage?”, “Does this mean if carpet is badly stained in a property, and there is no one there to witness it, it isn’t the tenants fault if they promise (without their fingers crossed) that they didn’t do it?” He didn’t say much to this, but went on with his order.

 In short, the only logical explanation for the paver profanity is apparently this:

The tenants handed back possession and went and tucked themselves into bed after a warm cup of milk. At around 1am, someone scaled the walls of the secure building (with a gurney in hand) and proceeded to leave me a little note without waking a single soul. After creatively leaving this message in the pitch black, they jumped the fence again and ran off into the night never to be seen again.

 Obviously that makes much more sense than these tenants; who have no issue refusing to pay rent & blaming everyone around them when they are finally evicted doing something as unthinkable as perjuring themselves at VCAT”

Property Managers – What has been your most frustrating VCAT hearing?