If you’ve always rented your apartment/house, chances are you’ve had your fair share of landlords and not all of them have been stellar. However, I bet none of them have ever decided to move into your property while you’re still there, right? Sadly, that’s exactly what happened to one family in Australia — their landlord pitched a tent in their back yard and has refused to leave!
A Current Affair
- The family had only been in the home for about two months. Nicky and William and their three children rented the property in Yama, New South Wales via an estate agent and things were going well for the first two months. However, one night they received a text from landlord Pascale Hubert that simply said: “Dear Nicky and William, I am the owner. As of tonight I will be occupying the rear yard.”
- The landlord and his partner set up camp on Christmas Day and are refusing to leave. Not only are they sleeping in the tent they put up, but according to Nicky and William, they’re using the toilet in buckets and generally leaving their children “terrified” of the strangers in their back yard. Given that they’re paying $525 a week for the four-bedroom, two-bathroom house, you would think this wouldn’t be allowed, right?
- The couple and the landlord got into a major altercation. The incident, which was filmed by the couple, showed the landlord telling the couple to move their car so that he could access the back of the house. He shouted: “Listen here, s*** for brains, I’ve given you a warning, move that frigging car now, you are in big s***.” The landlord’s partner is said to have then dragged the family’s trampoline out of the garden and put gates up.
- Police say they’re powerless to do anything. While you might think there’s some kind of legal recourse here, that doesn’t seem to be the case. As Nicky explained to A Current Affair, “It’s day 11 of them living in the backyard. It’s completely bizarre to everybody we tell. Police and real estate don’t know what to do. Our children are terrified, they keep asking, ‘Who are they?’ and we can’t give them any answers. The police are telling us that the real estate should be physically removing these people and the real estate are saying they can’t do that.”
- The landlord claims it’s all totally legal. According to Pascale, pitching a tent in the back yard and living in it is totally legal because the rental didn’t include use of the back yard in the contract, something the family say they were completely unaware of. That being said, Leo Patterson Ross, chief executive of Tenants Union of NSW, still believes the landlord and his partner could be guilty of trespassing. “It could be that the landlord is trespassing whenever they go across that driveway area because they are entering into a place that they’ve given someone else possession,” he explained. “At the end of the day, while the lease says that the backyard isn’t included, the landlord has to go down the driveway that the lease doesn’t talk about and what the lease also promises the tenant is reasonable peace, comfort and privacy in their home.”
