A plan to set up a public register of boarding house landlords has drawn broad support from across the housing and legal sectors, as a member’s bill born out of the deadly Loafers Lodge fire moves through its select committee stage.
The Residential Tenancies (Registration of Boarding House Landlords) Amendment Bill, in the name of Labour MP Jenny Salesa, passed its first reading in April with the unanimous backing of every party in Parliament. Submissions have now closed and the social services committee is working through them before reporting back to the House.
If the bill becomes law, anyone running a boarding house would have to register with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, renew that registration every year, and pass a fit and proper person test. That test would weigh up serious breaches of tenancy law, certain criminal convictions and insolvency. Landlords would also have to keep proper records about their tenants and their buildings, and hand those over to the ministry when asked.
Salesa has said the bill grew out of door knocking in her electorate. “Unfortunately I came across in doing that quite a few boarding houses that were not fit for human beings to live in or for animals to live in,” she told RNZ.
The legislation comes three years after the Loafers Lodge fire in Wellington in May 2023, which killed five people and injured 20. The tragedy put a spotlight on the men and women who live in boarding houses, often older people, people on low incomes and those with nowhere else to go, and on how lightly that part of the rental market is regulated.
Boarding houses sit in an unusual spot under the law. They are covered by the Residential Tenancies Act, but there is no single list of who runs them, how many there are, or whether the people in charge have a track record of putting tenants at risk. The bill is an attempt to close that gap by making registration the price of doing business.
Support has come from groups that do not always line up on housing questions. The Law Association backed the idea of a register, while arguing it should go further. Its property committee spokesperson, Joanna Pidgeon, said the problem was not only the operators but the buildings themselves. “We would like to see the bill go further because often it’s not just the people who are operating these boarding houses which have created problems it’s actually the standards of the boarding houses themselves which create the issues,” she said.
The New Zealand Council of Christian Social Services lodged a strong submission in favour. Chief executive Alicia Sudden said too many people end up stuck in boarding houses far longer than the short stay they were meant to be. “This leaves people for whom a boarding house was designed to be a stop gap, with limited access to more long-term and secure housing options,” she said.
Even some of those who would have to register were open to the idea. Fred Ofa, co-owner of Charlton Property Management, which runs 20 boarding houses in Auckland, said a register made sense. “I think it’s a sensible thing that they do regulate it,” he said. He did sound a note of caution about cost, saying the change brought “the additional costs without addressing the real issue behind the shortage of affordable housing”.
That tension runs through much of the debate. Almost no one is arguing that unsafe or filthy boarding houses should be left alone. The harder questions are about how far a register should reach, whether it should grade the buildings as well as the people, and whether new paperwork will quietly push some operators out of a market that is already short of cheap rooms.
Because the bill started its life with cross party support, it has a better chance of surviving than most member’s bills, which are drawn from a ballot and often fall over once the politics turns. The unanimous first reading vote means National, ACT and New Zealand First all let it through, even if they may yet seek changes at the committee table. The submissions are due to be made public in the coming weeks.
For the people who live in boarding houses, the practical question is simple. A register on its own does not fix a leaking roof, a blocked fire exit or a broken heater. What supporters argue it does is create a paper trail and a gatekeeper, so that an operator with a history of dangerous buildings cannot simply close one boarding house and open another down the road under a new name. Whether the final bill delivers that will depend on the detail the committee settles on.
You can read the bill and follow its progress on the New Zealand Parliament website, and you can compare where the parties stand on housing and other issues ahead of the November election using our voting tool.
What do you think? Should boarding house landlords have to register and pass a fit and proper person test, or does the answer lie in building more affordable housing in the first place? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
Leave a Reply