QLD Change of move in date less than 24 hours prior to move kn

Hi everyone,

My wife and I secured a rental property to move into this week. We have signed the contract and paid the deposit to the RTA for a start date of 11/06. The agent rang my wife today and said that the owners of the apartment have had its settlement pushed back to Wednesday so we can't move in? Is this legal? We will have no place to go and a lot of furniture on the sidewalk.

Any insight would be appreciated, thank you

 

I believe the building is managed by an on-site, who is facilitating the rental process. The sale is between the developer and a private party... but in short, yes. It was supposed to settle today.

 

Nothing usual, delays happen & this impacts everyone in the chain.

Your furniture goes into storage for a couple of days & you eat take away, sleep on the floor & move when the place is ready. You just delay handing back to your agent & they will fob off any incoming tenant into your current property. (you pay a few more days rent & it'll take weeks for the current agent to get orders to kick you out).

Or put pressure on the property manager to give you temporary/alternative digs in the new building.

 

We are currently in our home, which will not be our home tomorrow (settles at 12:30pm tomorrow). Most of our stuff is in storage, but there is about a room full of day-to-day living stuff. If we had to wait until Wednesday we would need to store it somewhere. I had planned to move everything over tomorrow!

 

This would work if we weren't settling on our house tomorrow! Played it too close to the line, lesson learnt for next time.

 

Contact Need Advice — Tenants Queensland

 

Never assume settlement will happen. Potentially the current owner could allow you to move in early under a licence agreement

 

Isn't the lesson for your new landlord, who sounds like they are in breach of contract if they can't provide the premises on the starting day as contracted?

 

Thanks for the advice everyone. I will give the hotline a call and see what our options are.

 

I've said it before on this forum and here we are yet again.

There is a GOLDEN RULE of property management and that is:

AN AGENT OR OWNER SHOULD NEVER EVER SIGN A LEASE WITH A TENANT UNLESS THE AGENT OR OWNER IS 100% CERTAIN THAT THE PREMISES ARE VACANT.

The owner and/or the agent will need to pay for your emergency/temporary accommodation because of this stuff up.

 

Pointy end of the stick, you have a pretty strong case to claim compensation for the resultant costs involved such as temporary accommodation, storage, removalists, etc. from the Lessor/Agent in QCAT. Pretty clear cut if this was something I was handling and in your shoes IMO. As thatbum said, Lessor/Agent in breach of contract, and as Phoenix Pete said, there are risks involved if you cannot guarantee possession when the contract says you must.

@MWestern, I would say "you do you" managing your affairs till you get the keys, then send a the Lessor/Agent whomever you deal with a polite direct email "you did this" "caused us this" "and this is the cost" and if they don't agree then lodge a minor civil dispute and see what an Adjudicator says.

*Nb. you'll first need to lodge a Form 16 dispute resolution request with RTA, go through the process of that, which may or may not yield a result for you, if not, you'll get a notice of remedied dispute and can then proceed to QCAT - Residential tenancy disputes | Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal (qcat.qld.gov.au)

 

For some reason I didn't get the notification for this from @wylie , did you @Michael Mitchell ?

I 100% agree with Michael, this is a clear example of what can happen if an agent/owner signs (i.e commit) a lease before the property is vacant. The reality is that signing in advance happens (regularly) anyway, but this is the potential result regardless.

My understanding is that you do have a strong case for compensation, however, you might not want to commence your tenancy with the threat of charging thousands of dollars of storage and accomodation to your new Landlord, so be tactful. Advise the agency that this situation has left you in dire straits, and you've received advice that you can seek compensation, but you'd hate to do that to your new Landlord when they've obviously not meant for this to happen, so you'd really like it if we could all come up with a mutually beneficial solution... might motivate them!

If there is no other option but for you to have to put everything into storage and stay elsewhere, and the new Landlord is receptive, perhaps try to minimize the cost? If they're being difficult, well.. that opens an entirely new can of worms.