Tenant room painting
Question from Rach updated on 3rd August 2015:
I agreed to let my tenant paint a bedroom for her daughter. Now that she is leaving I have asked that it be returned back to its original colour. Have I mistakenly assumed this as my right? As she is refusing to do it, I am extremely annoyed that my agent never advised me of this in the beginning. Can I do anything about it?
Our expert Bernard Parker responded:
You really have answered the question yourself. You gave the tenant permission to paint her daughter’s bedroom. You can’t assume that in receiving that permission the tenant would understand a need to restore the room to the original paint colour. That would be totally unreasonable. Neither the tenant nor the agent would expect that the bedroom had to be re-painted at end of tenancy. When you gave the tenant permission to repaint the bedroom you should have taken that opportunity to specify any conditions that you wanted to attach to that permission (such as completing the job in a reasonable time, standard of work and choice of paint colour). Then the tenant could decide whether to go ahead under those conditions. There is nothing you can do now, because you did not specify the requirement for repainting the room. If you don’t like the colour it will be up to you to have the room repainted.
Bernard is principal of Quinovic – Kapiti-Mana. Quinovic's outstanding people and systems provide the most professional, effective and reliable residential property management service in the NZ market for over 30 years.Search the Ask an Expert archive
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