How a Piece Of Paper Nearly Stalled a Tenancy Tribunal Case

Six months later the rent stopped. 

He'd been recording every payment on a piece of paper. 

He did the right thing after that. He lodged an application with the Tenancy Tribunal and got as far as mediation. His case was solid, the rent genuinely was owed, but the process stalled there, because the records weren't in a form the Tribunal could actually use. 

Facebook Fills a Vacancy, But It Doesn't Screen a Tenant. 

More landlords are sourcing tenants straight off Facebook groups and Marketplace listings, and I understand why. It's free, it's fast, and you're often talking to a real applicant within the hour instead of waiting on an agency to run an open home. But finding someone through social media tells you nothing about whether they'll pay rent on time or leave your property in the condition they found it. 

A profile with a nice photo and a friendly reply is not a credit check. It's not a background check. It's not a conversation with the landlord who dealt with this same tenant for the last two years and knows exactly how the tenancy actually went. Those three checks matter regardless of how quickly or easily you found your applicant. 

Pro Tip: Whatever channel you find an applicant through, run the same three checks every time before a tenancy starts, a credit check, a background check, and at least one previous landlord reference taken by phone, not text. Ten minutes on the phone will tell you more than a week of messaging ever will. 

Rent Records Aren't a Courtesy. They're a Legal Requirement. 

This is the part self-managing landlords underestimate most. Under the Residential Tenancies Act, landlords have to keep rent and bond records for at least seven tax years, and if the Tenancy Tribunal or the Tenancy Compliance and Investigations team asks for them, they have to be handed over within ten working days. Turn up to a rent arrears case without proper records and the mediator can't verify what's owed, which means the whole process stalls while you go and reconstruct months of payment history from memory. 

That's exactly what happened here. Every figure on his handwritten pages was accurate, the arrears were real and correctly totalled, but a page of dates and dollar figures isn't a rent ledger in the form the Tribunal expects, and mediation was delayed until he could produce one. 

We Turned His Paper Trail Into Evidence 

We took his handwritten records, cross-checked every entry against his bank statements, and built a complete rental ledger in the correct format. He submitted it in support of his Tribunal claim and this time the numbers held up under scrutiny because they were backed by a paper trail that matched, not a memory that mostly did. 

He's a WRE landlord now, managed through our Hamilton property management team. Going forward, the checks happen before a tenant ever gets a key, credit, background, and a real reference call to whoever managed that tenant last. If rent goes into arrears, our process starts on day one, not month three, because the single biggest cost in an arrears situation isn't the unpaid rent, it's the months a landlord waits before doing anything about it while a tenant keeps living in the property rent free. 

Compliance Isn't Optional Just Because Your Portfolio Is Small 

I hear the same reasoning from self-managing landlords with one or two properties: the Act is public, the forms are online, how hard can it be. Running a straightforward tenancy day to day is genuinely achievable on your own. Standing in front of a Tribunal mediator once a tenancy turns into a rent arrears dispute is a different problem entirely, and it's the one that most often lands on our desk once things have already gone sideways. 

Good record keeping isn't paperwork for its own sake. It's the difference between a Tribunal claim that gets resolved in one sitting and one that drags on for weeks while you scramble to prove what you already knew was true. 

A rent ledger you can hand over in ten minutes is worth more than a diary you have to explain. Don't wait for a Tribunal hearing to find out your records won't hold up. Get in touch with WRE today.