I am a severely disabled single older woman and have been renting a property in Gunnedah NSW for the past 2 years. My 12 month lease expired in April 2017 and I have been on a periodic lease since. Not once have I defaulted on paying the rent and I have taken care of the premises.

My daughter,husband,and three young sons rented a house at Nth Richmond.She made it very clear to the agent that she required a long occupancy,this was agreed to.The owner then decided to attempt to subdivide the property,despite considerable resistance from the neighbours.This required removal of a section of the existing house,so to allow for this, immediately the initial six months lease expired she was served notice to vacate,despite the aforementioned occupancy agreement.This notice arrived a few weeks before Christmas and was due to take effect on the first day of school for her eldest son.Although this complied with the statutory requirements it was completely immoral and shows the complete lack of any meaningful protection for a tenant that had done all the right things.

I lived next door to a home owner who had an anxiety disorder about noise. The day I moved in her asked me not to use one of the doors leading into my backyard. Bizarre, I thought, but I complied and even put a fridge in front of it for good measure. Over the next 12 months, he relentlessly complained to our estate agent about the noise from our property, even once calling the police about a ‘domestic dispute’. When they arrived I was in my pyjamas with a cup of tea in hand; I’d been reading in bed. Despite getting signatures from all other surrounding neighbours stating that we weren’t noisy and were in fact flawless neighbours, we were evicted from that property the moment the lease expired. My life utterly disrupted, turfed from my home, I complained to the estate agent who only admitted, “Yeah, that neighbour is a real piece of work. He’s been calling stipulating what gender (i.e. no women) and nationality the new tenants should be.” Instead of feeling vindicated, I was only dismayed. She knew I was evicted based on the vexatious rants of this madman but couldn’t care less. I was just another tenant.

I found a beautiful bedsit in Potts Point and before I moved in I cleaned every inch of the tiny apartment taking photos with my digital camera as I cleaned to include in the condition report. There were inbuilt cupboards where I cleaned what I figured were cockroach poop, in fact it turned out that bed bugs and cockroaches are good neighbours and coexist in the same habitats as they are not competing for food and the brown stains included bed bug droppings as well as tiny dead bugs squashed between where the door meets the cupboard. 

in March 2015 I got notice that I was being evicted from my home of five years in Newtown. The eviction was so the owner could renovate the place and put it back on the market at higher rent, letting them raise the rent quicker than they could with a continuous lease. 

We've just moved out from our last apartment - where our landlord and real estate agent tried to withhold $800 from our bond for things that were broken before we moved in (and listed in the condition report), lightbulbs that hadn't been changed (that we had emailed them about as they were unreachable without a ladder/electrician and they had responded that they would sort it out), that the bathroom wasn't clean (even though we hired professional cleaners that they recommended). 

Long term rental security is a major issue for us, as our little girl is starting school this year. The last thing we would want is to uproot her again, by changing schools because of unexpected rental increases. This happened in our previous rental, despite the landlord saying he would increase once every three years, the real estate had other ideas and increased twice in four years.

My partner and I lived in a 2 BR, bottom floor unrenovated flat in Randwick for 6 years.  We were good, reliable tenants - so much so that the strata managers ended up using us as their main contact for maintenance issues in the building.  

Most of the maintenance done on our flat was handled by the landlord's son, who freely admitted that his father believed in letting his properties stay in a decrepit state.  Our landlord was using rent money from these rundown properties to fund his retirement.

I was told by my real estate that there would be a general inspection, when they came around it was in fact the owners with another real estate agent looking around to see what improvements they could make to the property and when I asked what all the changes were about I was told the owners were selling and they asked us to leave early. 

I am a ‘landlord for over 40 years’, my preferred tenants are single mums with 1 or 2 kids; why? they will almost always be the best house keepers and rent payers. I always keep the rent about $15-20/week below market and that way give long term stability to these tenants.