What began as a few loose tiles eventually left a Brisbane renter without a shower, toilet and laundry for several months and a hotel bill for thousands of dollars which he is now attempting to claw back from a national real estate firm.
Student Sam Adams says he was initially told by Little Real Estate in March last year he would be without a shower for three weeks while repairs were carried out in the main bathroom of the flat he was sharing with a friend at Taringa.
But he says a series of delays and setbacks at the unit block in Brisbane’s inner-west saw the scale of the project blow out, and then some.
Five months later – with the situation still not fixed – the 30-year-old says he had to book into a hotel after his property’s main toilet and laundry were also taken out of action, an inconvenience he was told would only extend a few weeks more.
When it became clear repairs were again lagging, Mr Adams complained to Little Real Estate, and asked for compensation for his hotel bill.
The next day he was told his lease was not being renewed, an act he feels was retaliatory and not because the owner needed an empty home to complete extensive renovations.
Part of the matter has already been heard at the Queensland rental tribunal and dismissed a second hearing for potential compensation, which was due in the coming weeks.
But Mr Adams says this is much bigger than him.
He says his struggle is just the tip of the iceberg for renters, who often feel at the mercy of an unforgiving housing market tilted in the favour of investors and property managers.
“Literally everyone I speak to that’s a renter has a horror story,” Mr Adams tells NCA Newswire.
“Everyone. And people just, I guess, have been trained to accept that that’s the way it is; that renters just cop a raw deal in Queensland.
“But I really don’t think it needs to be that way.”
“I was f**king furious”
Mr Adams says his ordeal began in March 2021 when he and his housemate were told bathroom repairs would need to be completed at their unit, which they had been sharing since 2018 and were renting through Little Real Estate for $330 a week.
But he says what initially appeared to be chipped and loose tiles soon became a wider project that necessitated the removal of the bathtub from the main bathroom.
Mr Adams said he was resigned to using his housemate’s ensuite to wash while the repairs were carried out over a period of three weeks.
“Which is inconvenient, you know,” he says.
“My housemate and I had different schedules. So a lot of the time I would have to come to uni to have a shower.”
Mr Adams’ rent was reduced by about $30 a week to compensate for the inconvenience, but what followed was a six-month saga of setbacks, confusing back-and-forth communication, and people consistently traipsing through the property to assess the situation.
Mr Adams also said he was contacted by builders at one point needing to be let into the unit because a spare key held by the office had been lost.
A Little Real Estate property manager would later indicate at a tribunal the repairs had certainly been made more complicated due to negotiations with the building’s body corporate and the builders, arguing the delay was no fault of the property owner.
Little Real Estate – founded by rich lister Paul Little – did not respond to a list of questions from NCA Newswire for this article, citing privacy obligations.
In August, after months of uncertainty, Mr Adams said he and his housemate were told the main bathroom would need to be completely remodelled, meaning he would now be without a shower and toilet, and the pair without a laundry for three weeks.
Mr Adams said he volunteered to stay in a cheap hotel for the duration of the repairs – costing him $600 a week – as he was not enthused by the prospect of builders and tradesmen working around him in the middle of a hectic uni schedule.
While he had accepted the hassle of sharing his housemate’s ensuite shower, adding his ensuite toilet into the mix for several weeks was not an option.
“I said all right, I’ll just go to the cheapest hotel I could find at Indooroopilly and then it’ll be like a little holiday.
“I’ll come back to a nice, brand new bathroom.”
But when he swung by the unit to check on the progress in September, it was clear he wouldn’t be coming home any time soon.
“The bathroom had been gutted, but then they’d stopped there. I was f**king furious.
“So I called (Little Real Estate) up (and said) ‘what the hell’s going on?’
“And they couldn’t give me a straight answer.”
“The only way I found out that the work had stalled was because I went to look at it myself.”
Mr Adams said the property owner and Little Real Estate eventually agreed to halve the rent until the repairs were done, but he says his 10-week stay in the hotel still left him about $6000 down, even once the rent reduction was factored in.
“They didn’t volunteer that (rental decrease); I really had to be really firm with them in order to get that,” Mr Adams said
“I was really very unhappy about it, starting to feel quite traumatised.”
It was during this time he reached out to the South East Queensland Union of Renters, who worked with him to draft a formal letter to Little Real Estate outlining a list of actions needed to remedy the situation.
“This has just been out of everybody’s hands”
The letter – delivered in October to Little Real Estate’s Spring Hill office in the company of a dozen or so SEQUR members – asked for Mr Adams to be reimbursed for the hotel expenses that exceeded what would have been normally paid in rent.
The letter also asked for the main bathroom repairs to be completed, and for a positive rental reference to be provided should Mr Adams decide to move out once his lease was up.
“It was pretty politely worded,” Mr Adams said.
“And (going around to the office) wouldn’t have been out of the blue; the property manager and everyone – if they were doing their job – they would have known that I’d be sitting there fuming.”
The next day Mr Adams was told his lease would not be renewed.
So Mr Adams took the matter to the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal, alleging the eviction was a retaliatory measure.
At the hearing held in January, Little Real Estate denied the non-renewal of the lease was retaliatory, while the adjudxjmtzywicator also acknowledged the dire need for the unit to undergo wider repairs.
“We gave two months’ notice, and the owner instructed us to … not renew the lease, so we then issued the tenant with the correct form,” a Little Real Estate property manager said, according to a transcript of the matter.
Little Real Estate also told the hearing they had previously offered Mr Adams the option of breaking the lease as repairs dragged on, and had offered to find another property for him to rent.
“So we have been working with him, and this is no fault of the owner,” the property manager said.
“The owner has been extremely on the ball of making decisions that she can: she’s been chasing up body corp.
“This has just been completely out of – you know – everybody’s hands.”
Little Real Estate was also unimpressed that Mr Adams and SEQUR members had spent several months protesting outside the company’s Spring Hill office, which had caused “quite a lot of disruption”.
The protests have continued well into the new year.
Mr Adams said the rallies – supported in solidarity by similar tenancy groups in NSW and Victoria – only came after he felt he had exhausted all his options, including suggesting a conciliation process with the Rental Tenancy Authority.
“I did everything that I could to try and settle this civilly,” Mr Adams told the hearing in January.
“It was pretty clear that they weren’t coming to the table.”
In the end, QCAT adjudicator Peter Eardley dismissed the matter and instead urged both parties to focus on the more crucial upcoming hearing that will focus on whether Mr Adams will be paid compensation.
“I’ve got hopes. I don’t know how realistic they are,” Mr Adams said.
“One of my really deep hopes would be that word about it sort of gets out a little bit.
“Property managers might sort of get the picture that if they‘re stuffing around tenants, there’s a good possibility that 30 people will be rocking up out the front of their office.”
Fears renters have ‘no power’
The dispute between Mr Adams and Little Real Estate comes during a time where tenants across southeast Queensland feel the pressure of soaring rents and increasingly limited choice in housing.
A major Queensland property shortage has been exacerbated by an influx of new residents from southern states, with major recent flooding also leaving many homes uninhabitable.
This means there is fierce competition for rentals, with properties being snapped up within hours of being listed, even factoring in hugely inflated rental costs.
Housing advocates say it’s not just low income earners who are struggling to afford rent, with middle-class professionals also caught up in what has become a major economic problem.
The latest Domain rental vacancy report shows Brisbane’s vacancy rate is just 0.8 per cent – below the national average 1.1 per cent and down on the 2.6 per cent that is considered “healthy”.
Rent in the city jumped 13 per cent over 2021 in what has been recognised as the city’s longest continuous period of rental price growth.
Brisbane City Councillor Jonathan Sri – the Greens’ representative for the Gabba Ward – said landlords and real estate agents enjoyed a power imbalance that made it very difficult for renters to negotiate.
“A lot of renters worry that if they complain about inadequate maintenance and repairs, or assert their other rights, that they’ll either be kicked out for no reason,” Mr Sri said.
“Or their rent will be jacked up. So as long as landlords have the power to increase the rent at short notice, or kick someone out without a proper reason … tenants won‘t have the power to insist on their other basic legal rights.”
