Renting has become a life-long reality for many individuals and families. Homeownership is now at a 60-year low and over a third of all New Zealanders live in rental homes.

The reform of the Residential Tenancies Act (RTA) aims to promote good-faith relationships in the renting environment, and to ensure there are appropriate protections in place for both tenants and landlords.

The RTA is the main piece of legislation that regulates interactions between landlords and tenants. This targeted reform of the RTA builds on our other initiatives to make life better for renters and to ensure everyone in New Zealand has somewhere they can feel at home. The reform focuses on:

• improving the security and stability of tenure for tenants while maintaining adequate protection of landlords’ interests
• ensuring the law appropriately balances the rights and responsibilities of tenants and landlords to promote good faith tenancy relationships and help renters feel more at home
• modernising the law so it can appropriately respond to changing trends in the rental market
• improving the quality standards of boarding houses and the accountability of boarding house landlords.

This discussion document includes the following proposals:

• substituting the ability for landlords to terminate tenancies for any reason with specific and justifiable criteria for ending a tenancy
• setting the amount of notice a landlord needs to give to terminate a tenancy to 90 days under all circumstances
• limiting rent increases to once a year
• better equipping tenants and landlords to reach agreement about pets and minor alterations to the home
• whether further controls for boarding houses are needed to provide adequate protection for boarding house tenants
• introducing new tools and processes into the compliance and enforcement system.

Submissions close at 5pm on Sunday 21 October 2018.