Dealing with breaches of quiet enjoyment

If the tenant is having problems with their neighbour eg, loud noise late at night, and that neighbour is also a renter, then the tenant can raise this with the neighbour’s landlord.

A landlord has a responsibility to ensure their tenants don’t interfere with the quiet enjoyment of neighbours. In some cases this will be the tenant’s own landlord, ie, when the landlord owns multiple properties in a street or in an apartment block.

If it’s about noise, it may just be a matter of explaining the impact and coming up with a reasonable solution, eg, only doing noisy construction work between certain hours, or turning down the stereo a bit.

If talking to the neighbour is unsuccessful or the tenant doesn’t feel able to approach them directly, then the tenant might consider going through the landlord, but it may be more effective to deal with the noise by making a complaint through the local council. For information and options about dealing with noisy neighbours, see What can I do about my noisy neighbours?

The tenant has the right to quiet enjoyment even when the landlord wants to show prospective buyers, tenants, valuers and real estate agents through the house (s 48(3) RTA).

The landlord must ask the tenant’s permission for these visits to occur. The tenant can’t unreasonably refuse permission, but can require reasonable conditions to be met, eg, that visits only happen on specific days and between specific hours of the day. It may even be reasonable to ask for a rent reduction if the disruption is significant enough.

If there are disturbances that are interfering with the tenant’s experience of living at the property, and the tenant wants the landlord to address these, the tenant should:

• Record a description and the timing of each disturbance.
• Write a friendly letter to their landlord asking them to address the disturbance.
• Allow a reasonable period of time for the landlord to address the problem.
• If the problem is not addressed by the landlord, issue a 14-day notice setting out the breaches of the RTA and / or tenancy agreement, and formally ask the landlord to stop the disturbance.
• If the behaviour or activity continues, the tenant can ask for assistance from the Tenancy Tribunal.

If there are major disruptions to the tenant’s quiet enjoyment of the property, eg, significant building works going on, which can’t be easily stopped, the tenant can:

• Record a description and the timing of each disturbance.
• If the tenant wants to keep living in the property, despite the disturbing activity, the tenant could ask for a rent reduction (s 24A RTA) for the period that the activity will be happening.
• The tenant could also ask for conditions to be agreed around the disturbance, eg, that the work be done at certain times of the day, or a barrier be put up to reduce the impact.
• If the disturbance means that the tenant no longer wants to live at the property, they may be able to end their tenancy.