NSW tenancy laws say how residential tenancy agreements can be ended.
Tenancies are usually terminated by the tenant, landlord, the landlord's agent, or by a NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal order.
Fair Trading is conducting an ongoing end-of tenancy survey to collect data about how and why tenancies end. This will help us better understand the renting experience to help inform future tenancy reforms. The current survey commenced on 2 August 2021.
The survey content and questions have been developed with reference to the laws about how tenancies can end under the NSW Residential Tenancies Act 2010.
The survey process
We are asking every principal tenant and landlord or nominated agent to complete a survey when a bond claim is finalised through our online bonds system Rental Bonds Online.
Survey invitations are sent by email and participation is voluntary. Individual responses are kept anonymous. Results are regularly published on the Fair Trading website website through the Data NSW Portal.
Fair Trading initially conducted a pilot survey in 2019/2020. Results from that survey informed the current ongoing end of tenancy survey and can be found here.
The current survey has been updated since the original pilot survey to address some of the limitations and improve the usefulness of the collected data to inform, assess and evaluate tenancy policy in NSW.
The end of tenancy survey
The survey data is collated every three months and is available to download for use by the community, research, business and industry.
To mitigate re-identification risks, postcode information has been removed and response dates grouped into months.
It should be noted that the representativeness of the survey data is limited, including because:
- participation is voluntary
- the survey only includes respondents who used Rental Bonds Online to lodge and claim their rental bond, so the sample does not extend to all terminated tenancies
- no demographic information is collected
- some tenancies had duplicate responses
- domestic violence victims may also self-select out of completing such a survey, given their vulnerability and the difficult circumstances they may experience after ending a tenancy.
Available for download:
- End of tenancy survey questions
- End of tenancy survey data (connects to Data NSW Portal)