Rent applications are increasingly dodgy. It’s time politicians stuck up for renters

When national cabinet meets on Wednesday, renters’ rights will be first on the agenda. The prime minister and premiers have earmarked efforts to better align rental policy across the states and territories.

The meeting comes as NSW looks to join the other states (except WA) in banning no-grounds evictions. Victoria is also reportedly mulling stricter limits on rent increases.

Such measures are welcome. But as any renter will tell you, even with existing inadequate protections there is often a gulf between the letter and spirit of the law and practices on the ground. Any further legislative action must be watertight and policed, giving landlords and agents little wiggle room to exploit their power imbalance over tenants.

And it’s not just landlords and agents we need to watch out for. Applications and administrative processes are typically mediated by online platforms. With rental vacancies at record lows, these tech companies are perfectly placed to squeeze desperate renters in various unethical, borderline-illegal ways.

Last week, Digital Rights Watch (DRW) launched a campaign to regulate such “RentTech” platforms, submitting a report to the Victorian, NSW and federal housing inquiries on dodgy practices by online rental companies. Fresh from an eye-opening house-hunt, I’ve seen some of these first-hand. Here are some of the warning signs renters — and politicians — need to look out for.

That’d be $400 a week, unless…

One of the first boxes on most application forms is the price. Thanks to legislative action against “rent bidding” in Victoria, NSW, Queensland and Tasmania, properties advertised there must provide a fixed price, not a range, and nor a contact number for an agent whose first question is: “How high can you go?”

Regardless, applicants frequently encounter editable price fields. Landlords and agents who configure the forms, and the tech companies providing the options, aren’t directly asking for higher prices. But they know full well what they’re doing — skirting the spirit of the law while maintaining plausible deniability. What renter wants to pay above the advertised price? Only those desperate enough for a home they’ll do anything to stand out.

Bans shouldn’t just extend to encouraging rent bidding, but facilitating or accepting bids too. The NSW Minns government promised to ban owners and agents accepting higher bids but its subsequent bill, stalled by the crossbench in June, would’ve merely required agents and owners to disclose higher offers to other applicants, potentially making the problem even worse. The bill is being redrafted, while an extension of solicitation bans on agents to owners and third party platforms has just kicked in.

Please attach copies of your dream journal …

Among the understandable financial and residential history questions, there are usually a dozen boxes requesting invasive personal information for unclear or suspicious reasons. Twelve pages in, you begin to wonder if they might next ask for photocopies of your dream journal and an X-ray of your internal organs.

Some requested information — such as gender, age, occupation, children and relationship status — are protected attributes which landlords aren’t allowed to discriminate against when choosing a tenant. In Victoria, if agents require you to disclose information that relates to a protected attribute, they’re meant to tell you why in writing.

Yet as DRW writes: “[Some] real estate agents continue to ask for this information — relying on renters not knowing their rights or being unwilling to exercise them.”

Some landlords could easily use that information to discriminate, provide no reasons or claim it was due to some other factor, and correctly assume the tenant is unlikely to take the matter to the relevant tribunal.

The same applies to questions about cars and pets. Even properties that don’t provide off-street parking often ask for details of the vehicles you own — perhaps the landlord lives a few doors up and wants to preference applicants who won’t compete with them for street parking.

In Victoria, landlords cannot refuse tenants’ requests to have a pet, unless they apply to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal with a good reason to refuse. Yet they can avoid this by simply asking applicants about their pets and picking non-pet owners.

Innovative ways to squeeze the vulnerable

The security of all this data is potentially worrisome, with real estate giants LJ Hooker and Harcourts hit by data breaches late last year.

Tech companies don’t just collect data for landlords’ benefit; they profit too. Multiple online platforms offer applicants premium, secure tools for identity verification and background checks — if they’re willing to pay extra. Other apps for payment processing and maintenance requests foisted on tenants impose extra fees that could be avoided via a simple bank transfer.

More dystopian is the increasing use of data for algorithm-generated applicant scores, and the potential on-selling of data to other parties. And as DRW observes, in the US “predictive financial systems” are deployed by large corporate landlords “to facilitate wide-scale cartel-like rent increasing”.

In this homeownership-obsessed country, it’s past time our governments turned their attention to renters, whose rights trail their counterparts overseas. But to succeed, our new laws mustn’t be as easily circumvented as the old ones.

Are landlords really as bad as they’re made out to be? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.