Property Investment
2 min read
Author: Andrew Nicol
Managing Director, 20+ Years' Experience Investing In Property, Author & Host
Landlords often think that “the Tenancy Tribunal is rigged”.
That’s it’s biased. And secretly favours tenants.
But is it actually true?
I wanted to know for sure … so I crunched the numbers.
The results will surprise you.
The Tenancy Tribunal is the place you go when a property investor has a dispute with their tenant.
Luckily, they publish all of their cases online.
So, I looked at 1,000 recent cases from the Tribunal.
82% of those cases ended up with a payment. Either the tenant or the landlord pays the other person money.
So, is it more likely that the tenant has to pay the landlord?
Or do landlords have to pay the tenants?
At the end of a hearing:
At first glance, you might think: “That means the Tenancy Tribunal is pro-landlord!”
Not quite. Landlords bring over 80% of the cases to the Tribunal. And if you bring a case, it’s often because you think you’re owed money.
When it comes to spotting bias, what you really want to look for is the ‘win rate’.
In other words … if a landlord takes a case to the Tenancy Tribunal, what percent of the time do they ‘win’?
And if a tenant takes a case to Tribunal, what percent of the time do they ‘win’?
The answer is:
So, landlords have a higher ‘win rate’ when they take a case to Tribunal.
This doesn’t prove that the Tribunal is biased in favour of landlords or tenants.
However, the numbers favour property investors more than many people would think.
Now you might ask: “Andrew, where did you get these numbers?”
I first approached the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE). They oversee the Tenancy Tribunal.
I used the Official Information Act to ask: “When someone takes a case to the Tribunal, who usually wins?”
They said they didn’t track the data.
So we approached a Russian data-scraper … who happens to live in Greece, to help us get the numbers. (It all sounds like a plot from a thriller movie.)
He wrote a piece of code that downloaded 1,000 Tenancy Tribunal cases. We then fed them into AI to see who pays who.
And that gives us our ‘win rate’, which is:
Based on our 1,000 cases:
Tenants ‘win’ nearly three-quarters of the time when they bring a case to Tribunal.
But landlords win more – about 98% of the cases they take.
That tells me that the Tribunal is a lot less anti-landlord than many people believe.
Managing Director, 20+ Years' Experience Investing In Property, Author & Host
Andrew Nicol, Managing Director at Opes Partners, is a seasoned financial adviser and property investment expert with 20+ years of experience. With 40 investment properties, he hosts the Property Academy Podcast, co-authored 'Wealth Plan' with Ed Mcknight, and has helped 1,894 Kiwis achieve financial security through property investment.
