Posts by Lucy Telfar Barnard
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Speaker: A minor change to existing provisions!, in reply to Matthew Poole,
I doubt she’ll be able to claim 3x40hrs cleaning. The place would have to have been an utter pigsty when you left to claim that, which seems unlikely after you’d spent 18 hours cleaning it yourself. The amounts I see awarded at the TT for cleaning are often around $400, but that’s almost invariably in conjunction with other awards for rubbish removal and weeding and so on that suggest the outgoing tenant’s efforts at cleaning had been low to non-existent, and also often when the tenant hasn’t appeared to dispute the matter. Assuming you have at least average housekeeping standards, I think the absolute maximum the TT would be likely to award would be in the region of 10 hours (and more likely much less than that); and the going rate for cleaning by the landlord will be $20 or thereabouts.
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Speaker: A minor change to existing provisions!, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Matthew, if you can resolve the problem at mediation then you won’t end up in the TT records. I’m afraid she can claim for cleaning costs when she’s done the cleaning herself, and there’s a set rate/hr the TT allows – but if she wants to do so, she needs to demonstrate that the property needed cleaning, so she’ll have to produce photographs showing it hadn’t been left “reasonably clean and … tidy”.
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Speaker: A minor change to existing provisions!, in reply to izogi,
There’s a clear reason to fear ever being discovered to have taken a landlord to the Tenancy Tribunal, lest it become a disadvantage when looking for somewhere else to live in future.
I agree entirely. I'd really like to see adjudicators able to rule that so long as a party to a hearing is mostly innocent in the matter, their names be left off the public Tenancy Tribunal (TT) documents. That won't help with the reference of course, but would help when landlords do TT searches on prospective tenants.
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Yay, Eli! *waves*
It's lovely to see the cabinet papers referencing the Housing Improvement Regulations 1947 as a living document.
Part 1 of the regulations are all good, if delightfully antiquated (regular mention of the privy, or the understandable but now outdated assumption in Clause 6 that a fireplace and chimney will be the standard method of heating). Houses must be fitted with an approved form of heating, be free from dampness, have adequate sanitation facilities etc.
Part 2 is more problematic. While we'd both agree that crowding is Bad for Health, I'm not so keen on it being made the landlord's fault. People crowd because they can't afford to rent enough bedrooms for everyone in the household. Many landlords limit the number of occupants allowed, but those who don't, or who set the limit high, provide those families with somewhere to live, even it's not ideal. I'm not sure that fining the landlord would improve those families' circumstances.
On the plus side, inflation since 1947 means $40 plus $10/day isn't going to sting landlords so much. The Treasury Inflation Calculator tells me $40 in 1947 would be $2898 now (and the $10/day would be $725/day), so it was clearly meant to be a meaningful fine at the time.
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Up Front: Not Uniform, in reply to Hilary Stace,
About kids being shamed because they cannot afford the new expensive uniform and shoes and all the extras rather than the shiny hand me downs.
Er. As I recall, having a new uniform and/or new shoes was not desireable. It made you look like a third former. And if you were lucky enough to find a previous, no-longer-available-for-sale-only-available-second-hand-or-hand-me-down and, according to the rules of fashion and uniforms*, much cooler, uniform, you were considered extremely lucky indeed.
*One of the rules of uniform fashion is that a school must change its uniform design to a shape just out of fashion, just as the outgoing design shows signs of coming back into fashion.
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David, I think Swan's point is that when you say "they have to get the money from somewhere", many of them will be getting the money from the sale of their house, which has gone up in value.
e.g. A village has 10 houses. All the people living in the houses own their homes. They bought them in 1965, when the going rate was 30c and a penny whistle.
One family leaves the village. Someone new comes to town and buys their house. They have lots of money, and they pay $1m for the house. So now all the houses in town are "worth" $1m. The townsfolk have a flurry of real estate activity, rearranging themselves amongst the 9 other houses, and paying each other $1m each for the properties. Noone has to borrow any money, because the value of their own home has gone up too. So the value of the houses has gone up, but the debt hasn't.
I'm 100% certain there's a reason why such a scenario wouldn't explain the graph you've provided, but I can't quite figure it out myself. I'm looking forward to hearing it.
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OnPoint: Don't put words in our mouths, Rob, in reply to HORansome,
Just what I thought when I read that too, and then I couldn't read any of the rest of it except through that lens.
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OnPoint: Don't put words in our mouths, Rob, in reply to chris,
The easiest bypass for that is to send RMB direct via those International money transfer companies you see around the place and convert it offshore.
Seriously? If it's possible to do that, then it doesn't sound to me like there's any kind of effective ban on taking money out of China at all. Not that I'm saying there should be, of course, only that there isn't.
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OnPoint: Don't put words in our mouths, Rob, in reply to BenWilson,
But I do think that the potential ability to influence prices is several orders of magnitude greater in the pool of buyers that outnumbers the population of NZ investers by perhaps a thousand-fold.
Yes. I have now gone and looked at the date and numbers of the sales data, and see that:
a) the sales were February to April, which is the period of peak sales. According to my earlier hypothesis, if overseas investor demand is steady through the year, that would mean that the B&T figures underestimate the presence of overseas investors in the market.
b) The B&T figures include 3,922 sales. I was going to query what percentage of the overseas investor market B&T covered – if they were really good at attracting that market, their figures would overrepresent overseas investor sales. However, 3,922 sales represent 45% of Auckland sales for that period. If we accept that 30% of the B&T sales were PRC-based (possible), then even if no other B&T sales were overseas investors, and no other agency sold to a PRC-based or other overseas investor (extremely unlikely) then overseas investment would still represent 13% of the Auckland market. That's a meaningful chunk, and certainly enough to drive up local prices, even if it wasn't an absolute minimum estimate of overseas investor presence in the market. -
OnPoint: Don't put words in our mouths, Rob, in reply to B Jones,
Only if they actually sell again when the crash happens.