Why is the premier favouring landlords over renters? I think I know

September 4, 2025 — 3.30pm

Public puzzlement over NSW Premier Chris Minns’ decisions to make life less pleasant for tenants and easier for landlords missed a number of salient points, not least the bleeding obvious.

As the Herald reported this week, the premier has made a captain’s call on rental laws, meaning that landlords will find it easier to deny tenants the right to keep pets in their properties.

Chris Minns has made a captain’s call.

Meanwhile, investor owners will be able to end tenancies simply by writing a note saying they are planning renovations, rather than providing authentic quotes from builders as proof that such plans are underway.

It’s a double blow to tenants, especially those who seek security of tenure and a decent quality of life. But these tweaks (or U-turns, depending on your point of view) to announced laws have very little to do with renters; they are all about future owners.

If it’s going to solve the housing crisis without becoming a large-scale developer itself, the state government needs people to take the riskiest property gamble of them all – buying investments apartments off the plan.

Pre-sale of apartments is how developers convince banks to lend them the money they require to build the unit blocks the state and the nation needs. Individual investors are right there at the beginning of the property development cycle. Tenants are at the end.

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If developers can’t attract buyers, they can’t get the banks to lend them the huge sums needed to build apartment blocks, which are not just the best way of dealing with the housing crisis, they are the only truly effective way. Viewed through that lens, you can see that Minns recent public positions boil down to “don’t spook the horses”.

According to the UNSW report Strata Insights, about 50 per cent of the apartments in NSW are tenanted, which (obviously) means half of them are owned by investors.

If even just 10 per cent of potential investors are deterred by a negative perception of apartment ownership, where the possible pitfalls outweigh the potential advantages, housing targets that are already drifting will sail even further away.

The state needs potential investors not to be nervous. But they have been and with good reason.

Building defects, alleged dodgy strata managers, pro-pet laws that seemed to make companion animals almost compulsory, growing demands to end tax breaks for investors and the inability to give tenants notice to quit without a solid reason, all weigh heavily on some landlords’ minds. They feel like they are taking all the risk for very little reward, and they could use a little confidence boost.

The past year of bad publicity about strata managers would not have made anyone feel they were guaranteed to be treated fairly and honestly. That may explain the premier’s recent visit to the headquarters of strata management giant Netstrata, despite Fair Trading still investigating more than 40 complaints against the company.

Then there was his pre-budget speech last year when he basically said issues about negative gearing were not even on his agenda, despite growing grumblings about “subsidised” investors pricing resident owners out of the market.

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On building defects, it has been almost a year since Building Commissioner David Chandler retired from very publicly kicking butt and taking names. Most apartment owners would be hard-pressed to even name his low-profile successor, although it’s almost certain that the problem has not been resolved.

Meanwhile, the premier’s characterisation of opposition to apartment building as “toxic NIMBYism” and his decision to confront the great and the good of Woollahra over his plan to build 10,000 homes in unit blocks in the area, is another endorsement of high-rises.

It makes sense. The state government needs more homes to be built and to even get close to reasonable targets, that means persuading people who might invest in apartments that it isn’t too much of a gamble.

And if that requires reassuring them that they won’t be forced to accept pets, that they can move their tenants on when they choose, that their strata managers won’t screw them over and defects are but a distant memory, then the Minns message is clear: “don’t mention the war, and we’ll all be fine”.

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