u/gooohgly

Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/AusRenters/s/DhNm3QtPtf

Just received an email a couple of minutes ago and yes! We got our bond back.

It took almost 4 months for us to receive a determination of our bond dispute and phew, I’m just glad that it’s over! You won’t receive any updates until they make a decision and then both parties are given a week to dispute the decision made.

For anyone that’s curious - Basically we were told by the REA that we owed them rent up to the day the owners had decided that they’d like to move in. We provided evidence that this decision was made because we chose to move out only and that we had done our due diligence to find suitable tenants in the form of screenshots on Facebook of conversations and posts we had made. We also included all correspondence between us and the REA (or lack of) to show that we weren’t really being kept in the loop properly either.

Factors influencing their decision in our favour included:

- low rental vacancy rates and high demand for rentals in our area. As properties in our area were often taken within 1-2 weeks from the date they were advertised on, we had provided the REA with a suitable timeframe for finding a new tenant / mitigating loss

- the owners did not provide any supporting evidence to explain the delay in their decision to move in and that it was not communicated to us

- the owners did not provide sufficient evidence to show that they were mitigating rental loss as well

Happy to share more details if anyone’s curious. Thanks again to everyone who responded to my original post too!

About two weeks ago, we found a much better place to move into and decided to break our lease. We signed the agreement to break our lease intending to hand over the keys on the 22nd of June and had initially been told to market the place and find a suitable tenant should we want to avoid the marketing fee.

However, after showing the place to 3 different groups of people, last week, one of them told us that after calling our real estate agent, they were told that our landlord wants to move back to the house instead. Our agent insists that she told my partner last week but he definitely wasn’t as we weren’t even able to get hold her on the phone and we’re leaving the office messages asking to confirm this.

We only got the confirmation in writing today regarding this matter as I made a Facebook post looking for tenants to move into our place and put the real estate’s details in it directly (they got bombed with calls and emails and called me to delete the post).

I’m currently worried about the lease break contract we signed indicating that we’re responsible for paying the rent during the mandatory 5 business day vacancy period and for however long till “a suitable tenant is found” till the end of our actual lease term.

Can the real estate legally force us to keep paying for our rent in this situation? I tried to ask our agent directly regarding this and she only said that “we shouldn’t be liable for rental payments beyond the 5 day vacancy period but will confirm with us at a later date”. We only have a week before we have to hand the keys back!