A government agency is running a three-month trial from August to speed up Tenancy Tribunal cases involving unpaid rent and serious health and safety problems. RNZ

The Tenancy Tribunal is the official body that sorts out disputes between landlords and tenants in New Zealand. It covers rented homes, boarding houses, and unit title disputes. Tribunal decisions are publicly searchable online through the Ministry of Justice website, and the Ministry publishes annual reports at justice.govt.nz/tribunals/tenancy/.

Unpaid rent is the single biggest reason people go to the tribunal. It made up over 60 percent of all applications last year, according to RNZ reporting based on Official Information Act documents. Those documents also show the average wait for a first hearing has reached 48 days, up three days from 2023. The average time from mediation to a final decision has grown from 15 days in 2023 to 20 days now.

Kat Watson, who heads the tenancy team at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), told RNZ that dealing with unpaid rent cases faster also helps tenants by stopping large debts from building up. The New Zealand Property Federation's Matt Ball said his organisation had been pushing for rent arrears cases to be prioritised for years. Darryl Fisher of Go Property Rentals in Waikato told RNZ that long wait times meant thousands of dollars in debt piled up for landlords while cases sat in the queue.

Renters United president Luke Somervell saw it very differently. He told RNZ that Tenancy Services was "favouring landlords getting their money back over renters getting their money back" and was "basically setting themselves up as a debt collection agency for landlords." He also worried the trial would trigger a "feeding frenzy" of landlords rushing through unpaid rent cases.

Other changes are happening at Tenancy Services at the same time. RNZ reported that the month before the article, Tenancy Services launched an online system to manage bonds — the money tenants pay as security, held until the end of a tenancy — replacing a previous manual process. Renters were also struggling to get through the tribunal's phone systems, which had capped incoming calls.

The deeper question is whether the tribunal, which is supposed to treat landlords and tenants equally, can end up unintentionally favouring one side. Unpaid rent cases can be started by either party — a landlord wanting to end the tenancy and recover money, or a tenant disputing what they allegedly owe. MBIE's argument is that faster resolution stops debt from growing, which helps the tenant. Somervell's counter-argument is that most unpaid rent applications are started by landlords, so speeding up those cases mainly helps the side already using the tribunal to get money back.

What both sides agree on is that unpaid rent dominates the tribunal's workload and wait times are getting worse. The trial is an operational fix to reduce the most common queue, not a change to tenancy law. Whether it actually shortens wait times across all case types — or just moves unpaid rent cases ahead of everyone else's — will be clear once the three-month trial ends and MBIE looks at the results.

RNZ reporter Sammy Carter has asked renters with serious health and safety tribunal cases to share their stories, which suggests more reporting on that part of the trial is coming. The health and safety side has had less public attention than the unpaid rent fast-track but is a parallel change in how the tribunal sorts its cases.

The groups lined up on either side of this debate are the same ones that have shaped tenancy policy in Aotearoa for years: property owner groups wanting faster enforcement of unpaid rent, and tenant advocacy groups warning that speeding up debt recovery tends to help landlords first. MBIE sits between them, running a trial it says will reduce harm for both parties. The evidence for that claim will come from the trial's own results.