A woman was badly injured when the balcony railing of a Wellington rental collapsed less than an hour after a tenancy began.
“My sister leaned back lightly on the railing and all of a sudden the whole thing fell,” Marama Te Kira said.
“I didn’t know if she would be paralysed or what her injuries were.”
The tenant’s sister landed on a concrete pathway below, bouncing off a wooden planter box on the way down – breaking her sternum and seven ribs, as scans at the hospital would later show.
“She was still conscious, but she was just groaning on the ground in pain. I just grabbed my phone and called 111.”
Te Kira ended the tenancy before the ambulance arrived and was refunded one week’s rent paid in cash earlier that afternoon.
Landlord David Bradley called the fall “an awful accident” but rejected claims the deck or building were unsafe.
He had since nailed the railing back in place. The council had subsequently assessed the deck as being not dangerous under the “very high” Building Act threshold, but Bradley said he would comply with their request for an engineer’s report into its condition.
“Eventually, I’ll do that. I’ve got no money at the moment.”
Bradley, who has owned the building in the suburb of Mount Cook since 1983 and currently lives in one of the six units, claimed to have only $4 in his bank account and acknowledged this made regular maintenance a struggle.
However, he was reluctant to sell, owing to the abject state of the rental market and a fear of homelessness.
“What am I going to do with a couple of hundred thousand dollars? I’ll burn through it in a couple of months, and then I’ll be [rough sleeping] on Courtenay Pl.”
When Te Kira viewed the one-bedroom flat that afternoon, she began to have second thoughts. The carpet was stained, she said, and the oven was broken. Bradley said he would repair the oven at a later date when he could afford to do so.
“Look, for $300 a week in rent, I’m not going to find anything better,” Te Kira remembers telling her sister, who came with her to collect the key.
“I’ve been looking for years; I need to grab this just to survive, I can afford to buy food if I live here.”
And it wasn’t all bad, she remembers thinking.
“There’s that great big deck and the million-dollar view.”
It isn’t the first issue at the Wellington rental. Last October, the previous tenant took Bradley to the Tenancy Tribunal after living for more than a year with a door-sized hole in the bedroom wall.
That hole was the consequence of an abandoned renovation project, Bradley intending to replace a small window with a glass door before running out of funds part-way through the job. Instead, he hung a mesh door over the hole with string.
The hole became the only source of natural light in the room, breaking a law that requires bedrooms to have a window.
“Making a large hole in a bedroom wall and leaving it there for over a year and a half is not adequate maintenance,” the adjudicator wrote in her decision.
The oven was broken for the entirety of the three-year tenancy, something the adjudicator called “an intentionally unlawful act” on Bradley’s part, as he was aware it was not working.
At the hearing, Bradley claimed to be unaware of a requirement to lodge the bond and now couldn’t reimburse the tenant, as he had spent the money.
The adjudicator awarded the tenant $5500 for a number of breaches, including $1000 for the hole in the wall, $800 for the broken oven and $1000 for Bradley’s failure to lodge the bond.
Bradley said he disagreed with this decision but wanted to move on. “I’m just paying the fine and getting on with things.”
He still owes the previous tenant about $3000 – the balance reduced mostly through a rent rebate at the end of the tenancy – and continued to make “very small payments” according to the tenant’s lawyer.
Reliance on tenants to pursue landlords — advocate
Community Law Aotearoa solicitor Rupert O’Brien said the system currently relied on tenants to pursue landlords through the courts to chase up fines.
“Assuming they actually achieve an order, they are then put in a position where they have to enforce it, and that can be really difficult and costly.”
Renters United president Zac Thomas said the situation illustrated the need for steeper fines and better enforcement.
The Tenancy Compliance and Investigations Team (TCIT), who are tasked with investigating potential breaches by landlords, had limited resources, Thomas said, meaning they couldn’t always follow up complaints adequately.
TCIT did previously visit the Mt Cook rental after receiving a complaint about the hole in the bedroom wall. Bradley was ordered to reinstate the window, resulting in a “temporary repair” where it was wedged back in place with makeshift jib, stuffing, tape and paint.
“The photos of the repair did ostensibly satisfy TCIT who closed their investigation,” the Tenancy Tribunal adjudicator would later note in her decision.
The previous tenant’s lawyer shared a complaint made to the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment about that investigation. It was closed prematurely, the complaint states, needing better follow up from TCIT “to verify the landlord’s claims repairs had been completed”.
TCIT national manager Brett Wilson said he remained confident the investigation was conducted “thoroughly and professionally”.
His team would contact the landlord again, he said, to “assess current levels of compliance at the property” after being made aware of the incident with the balcony railing.
Te Kira’s sister was discharged from hospital four days after the fall and faces a months’ long recovery.
Meanwhile, Te Kira has moved back into her council housing flat, where her rent remains more than half of her income.
In the days after the incident, she made a complaint to Wellington City Council, whose building compliance team later visited the Mt Cook rental.
Council spokesperson Richard Maclean said its team determined the railing was not considered dangerous under the Building Act, noting the threshold for this is “very high”.
The council had requested Bradley get a statement from an engineer confirming the entire deck railing continues to comply with the Building Code.
It had allowed “a reasonable timeframe” for him to provide this statement, Maclean said.
By Ethan Te Ora
