Inspections: an insurance condition with a legal timetable

Why this is an insurance page, not a tenancy page

Tenancy Services says it in one line on its own inspections page: some insurance providers require the landlord to prove that regular property inspections are taking place. That is a government source telling landlords their cover may depend on it.

Vero says the same thing from the other side. It publishes that many landlord covers include specific obligations you need to meet to keep your insurance valid, and lists making regular checks of your property among them — alongside selecting tenants carefully and actively monitoring rent payments. Initio frames it as a claims condition: to claim under its landlord protection benefits you must be meeting your landlord obligations under the policy.

So an inspection is not just good management. It is potentially the difference between a claim being accepted and being examined.

What the law lets you do

The Residential Tenancies Act sets the boundaries, and they are tighter than some landlords assume.

• Frequency: a maximum of once every four weeks.
• Hours: between 8am and 7pm for rental properties, and between 8am and 6pm for boarding houses.
• Notice: at least 48 hours before the inspection, or at least 24 hours for boarding houses — and it should not be given more than 14 days in advance.

That last constraint catches people out. Notice given a month ahead is not valid notice. There is a window, and it has both a floor and a ceiling.

Meth testing carries its own notice

If you are testing for methamphetamine, at least 48 hours' notice is required (24 hours for a boarding house), and you must provide the results in writing to all existing tenants within 7 days of receiving them. Failing the notification and disclosure obligations around meth exposes you to exemplary damages of up to $7,200, and in some situations pecuniary penalties of up to $50,000. The full meth position is here.

Making an inspection worth something

Tenancy Services is practical about how to do it, and every point below doubles as insurance evidence.

• Bring the initial property inspection report — the one completed at the start of the tenancy as part of the agreement. Without a baseline you cannot show what changed, which is the whole argument in a damage claim.
• Bring a camera and take photos, in case the matter is disputed later. Be careful not to include the tenant's belongings where that can be avoided.
• Ask whether the tenant wants to be present. They do not have to be, but if they will not be there, ask them to leave a note of anything they want checked. That note is often where you first hear about a leak.
• Reinspect properly. If something was to be fixed by a date, you can go back — with the same notice again.

The per-event excess argument for inspecting

There is a financial reason to inspect that has nothing to do with claim conditions. Each “event” of damage carries its own excess. Vero explains the consequence on its own site: several separate stains accumulated over months would probably incur a higher total excess than the claim is worth, unless you can prove they came from a single incident.

Vero also names why this hits landlords hardest — an owner-occupier watches damage happen and knows it was three separate incidents, while a landlord inspecting rarely sees the total for the first time and experiences it as one event. Regular inspections are what let you treat damage as the discrete, recent, provable events it actually is.

Keep the file

Inspection reports are among the documents landlords must keep during the tenancy and for 12 months after it ends, alongside maintenance and repair records, healthy homes compliance records, advertisements for the tenancy, and correspondence with tenants and prospective tenants.

If an insurer ever asks you to demonstrate that inspections were happening, that file is the answer. Assembling it after the question is asked is considerably harder than keeping it as you go.

One thing you cannot refuse

While on the subject of what happens at inspections: if a tenant makes a minor change request — the example Tenancy Services gives is a cord tensioner or cord cleat to make blind cords safer for young children — the landlord must not decline it, and has 21 days to respond. Building a safety check into your regular inspection is the easier way to stay ahead of that.