Housing Minister Phil Twyford should heed a warning from tech firm Tether that if rental property owners don’t monitor the warmth and ventilation performance of their properties, they risk spending thousands of dollars on upgrades they don’t need, Tenancies War spokesman Mike Butler said today.
Kiwi tech start-up Tether – which designs and manufacturers monitoring systems like the EnviroQ to enable healthy living environments – says “diagnosis comes before remediation”.
Tether CEO Brandon Van Blerk said “you need to know what’s going on in the house first. How do you prove consistent temperature? How do you maintain the temperature? What happens when the tenant says it’s colder than 18 degrees Celsius and it isn’t?”
The Housing Minister has made a fundamental error by assuming all rental properties are damp, cold health risks when the evidence is that only 2.7 percent of tenants surveyed by BRANZ complained of cold and damp, Mr Butler said.
Based on that error, he has imposed heating, insulation, ventilation, draught-proofing and moisture-proofing on all rental properties that may cost $7000 per dwelling when it is largely not needed, he said.
The Minister has compounded that error by assuming that the 10,800 children hospitalised every year have been made sick by the poor quality of housing while not allowing for other factors present in the dwelling, such as smoking, drug abuse, poor hygiene, overcrowding, not to mention medical issues sick children may have inherited, Mr Butler said.
The 290,000 owners of rental property in New Zealand form a substantial voting bloc. They can see that the Minister is acting against the interests of both owners and tenants and will vote accordingly, he said.
Stop the War on Tenancies is a group that since last October has been highlighting the evidence that successive governments have ignored while creating rental property policy.
