You want a perfect example of the kind of rules that people think are good for tenants, but actually end up backfiring on them?

The two rulings that allowed tenants to keep pets despite explicit agreements that they wouldn’t, in both cases.

In the first case, a woman moved in to a property in Palmerston North. Landlord says the tenancy agreement “specifically excluded pets”.

She moved her guinea pigs in, the landlord tired to force her to remove her pets, but the tenancy tribunal let her keep them.

Why?

Because even though there was a written contract, the law doesn't ban them.

In the second case, tenants in an overcrowded flat got a dog.

The landlord tried to kick them for the overcrowding, and because they’d signed an agreement barring animals.

The Tenancy Tribunal said no.

Why?

The dog wasn’t a big enough problem to the landlord to justify the tenants’ distress at losing their dog.

Now I'm sure at least some of these tenants and their advocates think this is great, but this will probably backfire.

If you listened to talkback today, you’ll know this is freaking landlords out. They want to know that if there is an agreement that is reasonable it will be upheld, and saying no to pets is reasonable because there are other properties that will take pets. 

Houses are expensive. That is a lot of money tied up in that investment, and fixing the damage of a pet costs a lot.

We had a dog in a house of ours back when we weren’t living in Auckland, and we didn’t know it was there until we saw the paint scratched off the back of the front door.

And now, we can probably blame it for the fleas.

That's the lighter end of the kind of damage a pet can do.

Not every landlord is going to freak out about this, heaps of landlords have bought houses specifically for renting and will be fine with a good tenant having a pet. But I reckon there will be plenty of people who thought about turning the holiday home over for a short term rental or putting their own house up for rent while they take a job up somewhere else —like we did— who will just not do it.

Because they don’t want pets in their home, and they now can’t be sure that any agreement will hold.

Because the signal this is sending is that anyone who takes the house can bring in a pet, even if they promise not to.

And when we have a rental shortage, every house pulled off the market makes it worse.

So for any good this is doing on an individual level, it’s doing much more harm.