Condition reports: twenty minutes that decide the bond

Both New South Wales and Victoria require a condition report at the start of a tenancy, and both give the tenant a chance to disagree with it. Most landlords treat this as an errand. It is the most valuable twenty minutes in the entire tenancy, for a reason that has nothing to do with compliance.

The ingoing report is the only document in a tenancy written before anybody has a reason to want a particular answer. Everything produced later — the outgoing report, the photographs, the emails — is written by someone who now cares how it reads. Adjudicators know this. It is why the ingoing report carries weight out of all proportion to the effort it takes.

The room-by-room method

Work in a fixed order and never deviate from it, because a consistent order is what lets you compare the ingoing and outgoing reports line by line later. Same rooms, same sequence, same fields.

1. 1 Enter the room and take one wide photograph from the doorway. This is the shot that proves which room the close-ups belong to.
2. 2 Work clockwise: walls, windows and coverings, floor, ceiling, fixtures, power points, doors and their hardware.
3. 3 Photograph every existing mark, however trivial, and describe it in words as well — “scuff, 10 cm, east wall behind door”.
4. 4 Record what works, not only what is broken: taps, locks, smoke alarms, the oven, the exhaust fan.
5. 5 Note meter readings and the number of keys, remotes and swipes handed over.

What fair wear and tear actually means

The distinction that decides most bond claims is simple to state and hard to apply. Fair wear and tear is the deterioration that ordinary living produces over time, without anybody doing anything wrong. Damage is the result of an event, an accident, or neglect.

• Carpet worn thin along the hallway after four years is wear. A burn or a wine stain is damage.
• Paint faded by sunlight is wear. A hole from a bracket is damage.
• A tap washer that has perished is wear. A cracked basin is damage.
• Grout darkening in a shower is wear. Mould from an unreported leak may be neither — it may be a repair you owed.

Age matters as much as the mark. You cannot charge a departing tenant for a new carpet when the old one was already most of the way through its life. Tribunals apportion, and they apportion against whatever evidence exists about the condition and age of the thing at the start.

A bond is security against loss, not a renovation fund. The claims that fail are almost always the ones that would have left the property better than it started.

The outgoing report

Do the outgoing report with the ingoing report open beside you, in the same order, using the same words. The comparison is the argument. If you find yourself writing a fresh description of the property at the end of a tenancy, you have thrown away most of the value of the exercise.

Complete it promptly after the tenant hands back the keys, and give them a copy. A claim raised weeks later, against a property that has since been cleaned, repaired or re-let, is very difficult to sustain no matter how right you are.