Auckland Property Investors’ Association Welcomes Privacy Guidance

The Auckland Property Investors’ Association Incorporated (APIA) has welcomed today’s release by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) its Privacy Act guidance for landlords and tenants.

“Housing is an emotional issue for many Kiwis,” says APIA President Kristin Sutherland. “This guidance offers the sector some much-needed certainty and goes a long way to help build trust between landlords and tenants.”

The Association is particularly encouraged by its flexible and principle-based approach. “This is a far cry from the usual heavy-handedness landlords have come to expect from government agencies,” says Sutherland. The guidance sets out the information landlords can and can’t ask tenants in most cases while leaving ample scope for further inquiries to be made in appropriate circumstances. “To me, this is an acknowledgement that renting is not a cookie-cutter process. As long as landlords operate within the 13 principles under the Privacy Act, they should be able to dial-up and dial-down their inquiries in a way that supports the objectives of their rental business.”

Sutherland considers the monitoring framework released alongside the guidance as the Commissioner putting the sector on notice. “Compliance is not the most thrilling aspect of landlording. But oversight is necessary if we want people to have confidence in the system. We cannot pretend that there are no problematic behaviours that subject tenants to the indignity of information overshare. While I don’t believe those practices to be common, they certainly cast the entire sector in a bad light. Like many tenants, our members are frustrated by those landlords who do not treat their rentals as businesses and tenants as customers.”

“At the very least,” says Sutherland, “this framework clearly sets out what we can expect from the OPC in terms of how it will exercise its powers.”

The Association intends to make inquiries into the mechanisms of the anonymous tip line for tenants. “We want to make sure that this is a system of integrity with appropriate controls in place so that it is only dealing with genuine privacy complaints rather than adding superfluous compliance burden on landlords,” says Sutherland. “I don’t expect it to be a witch-hunt against landlords, but I want to be able to tell our members that honestly.”

Heartened by the good relationship between APIA and the OPC, Sutherland feels confident that this guidance and its future iterations will keep pace with the evolution of renting in New Zealand. “Throughout the entire review process, OPC staff members engaged us with a great deal of openness and curiosity. We understand that theirs is an unenviable task of balancing the competing interests between landlords and tenants. Despite that, they had always responded to our feedback with thoughtful deliberation and made us feel heard. Our goal is to build on that relationship so that we can be part of the positive movement to make renting fairer for everyone.”

The Auckland Property Investors’ Association Incorporated is a non-profit network that educates and supports property investors.

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