Question: When is it OK to say “No Pets in the Apartment”? What are the rights of NSW landlords to stop tenants from keeping pets?
Answer: Apartment landlords in NSW are perfectly entitled to say to their tenant ‘No pets allowed’.
Bylaws bind owners and tenants. There’s no reason why a bylaw can’t say that a tenant, for example, has to pay a bond to the Owners Corporation before moving a pet into the building, if they’re allowed to do so.
Under residential tenancy laws in New South Wales, landlords are entitled to prevent their tenants from keeping pets in the strata building.
This can, in some cases, overcome the problem that the court case has created for owners that want to live in pet free buildings.
I gave an Owners Corporation in Sydney advice recently about their no pets bylaw, and it was all doom and gloom for me, ‘Your bylaw is not worth the paper it’s printed on. You need to change it. You need to deal with this tenant who wants to move a dog into the building’, and of course, my advice didn’t go down particularly well, because the strata committee wasn’t particularly happy about being told that they’re no pets bylaw was no good.
What did emerge was that the owner of that apartment didn’t want dogs or any pets to be kept in it, like many landlords. Under the residential tenancies legislation in New South Wales, that owner was perfectly entitled to say to his tenant ‘No pets allowed’. That then was a neat way to deal with the problem and the strata committee was very relieved when they discovered that this owner was on their side and didn’t want pets in their apartment.
This post appears in Strata News #505.
Adrian Mueller
JS Mueller & Co Lawyers
E: adrianmueller@muellers.com.au
P: 02 9562 1266
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