My landlord didn't lodge my bond with the RTA, and is now refusing to return it. What should I do?

In this kind of a situation you don’t want things to get nasty.

So before you start pointing fingers, know your legal rights and responsibilities as a tenant and try to talk the matter through with your landlord. By law (Section 38A RTA 1994), your landlord should have provided you with a tenancy agreement stating the proposed standard terms and any proposed special terms.

This is a good place to start by checking that you haven’t breached any of the terms and forfeited your bond money. Other than this, two important things for you to know are:

1.    Under section 59 of the Residential Tenancies Act 1994, your landlord or the person who gives the right to occupy the residential premises, is provided to lodge the bond payment within 10 days after receiving the sum or the last instalment and can be faced with penalties if they haven’t.

2.     By law you should have been issued a receipt for the bond money you paid and your landlord can be penalised if he/she hasn’t. More specifically, under Section 76 of the Act it states that:

(1)A person receiving a rental bond must give a receipt for the rental bond as required by this section.

(2) The receipt must (a) be given to the person paying the rental bond when the rental bond is received; and (b) be signed by the person receiving the rental bond.

(3) The receipt must state the following (a) the name of the person receiving the rental bond; (b) the tenant’s name and, if the person receiving the bond is not the lessor, the lessor’s name; (c) the address of the premises for which the bond is paid; (d) the date the bond is received; (e) the amount of the bond; (f) if there are co-tenants and the co-tenants tell the person receiving the bond the proportions in which the bond is paid—the amount paid by each cotenant.

(4) The person giving the receipt must keep a copy of it for at least 1 year after the agreement ends.

If you can’t manage to come to a resolution by talking things through with your landlord, it would be best to contact the Residential Tenancies’ Authority dispute resolution service, by calling them on 1300 366 311 or visiting their site and following the link to the dispute resolution request form:

http://www.rta.qld.gov.au/applying_for_dispute_resolution_1.cfm.

Armed with specific details of your case, they will do their best to assist in resolving your issue through a series of conciliation meetings. However, if this dispute resolution process is still not successful, an application can be made to the Small Claims Tribunal.

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