My ex-landlord was dodgy, so I went the extra yard to warn the next tenant

A few weeks after I vacated my mouldy, poorly constructed, roach-infested rental in Sydney’s inner west, I drove back to the house with a letter addressed to the new tenant.

I’d been keeping an eye on a real estate website to see when it was rented again (and enjoyed gleeful schadenfreude when the house took a number of weeks to lease after the landlord tried to hike up the rent).

“Dear new tenant,” I wrote. “As a former tenant at this address, I wanted you to be aware of the building’s history to help you better advocate for yourself. I’ll list these briefly in bullet points. Quotes in italics were sent to us by the landlord’s real estate representative”.

I detailed how our books, clothes and furniture had been covered in mould in the winter, how they could expect ongoing issues from shoddy workmanship – and how to avoid losing their bond over it.

I parked the car and stalked the house, but fortuitously the new people were moving in that very day, the front door wide open.

“Helloooo,” I called out by the front garden. A young woman, smiling, fresh and seemingly unweathered as I was by successive years in unreliable rental homes, bounded out.

I began speaking quickly, waving my dossier in my hand. I don’t remember exactly what I said because I was too distracted watching her eyes widen and her body retract ever so slightly back towards the front door.

Deranged, I thought. I sound deranged. I guess a stranger turning up on the day of your move, sounding conspiratorial about your new home is a little disconcerting.

But I blame the landlords who had inspired me. For years, landlords have used privately owned tenant databases – historical blacklists – to screen out people they might avoid renting to. Why not the other way around?

The closest thing we have to a dossier database is Shitrentals.org – a review website launched over a year ago by housing activist Jordie Van Den Lamb – but with only a few hundred listings in my state of NSW (and thousands in other states), it’s a fraction of the total rentals available in Australia. The Facebook group Don’t Rent Me is also filled with posts naming and shaming horrific houses around Australia and offering advice on how to deal with unreasonable real estate agents. It has more than 90,000 members – but again, that’s a tiny proportion of Australia’s 2.9 million renters.

Reviews and online grievance airing are a start, but not enough. We need a nationally operated, mandatory database with clear data on the health status of a property, its accessibility and a landlord’s history with bond returns. In an age where every strand of our personal data is scattered digitally across government and corporate databases, why not the history of the buildings where we shelter our families? And about the landlords who operate businesses capitalising on our need for a home?

Before this kind of information is enshrined as a public right, renters need to get better at sharing knowledge with each other – a shared dossier for every house, delivered directly to the new tenant. In my rental revolution dreams, this information would be available within the rental advertisement itself, to easily see what you’re getting into.

I left my details in the letter, inviting the new tenants to contact me if they needed anything and advised them to “document everything”. The woman I spoke to hasn’t called yet. But when winter falls and the mould spreads thick and furry across her walls and possessions, and the landlord gaslights her into taking responsibility for things already falling apart, she just might contact me. And then, I’ll be ready to add to her evidence with my own archive of rental failure. So that maybe, next time, our dossier can help out the next sucker.

Belinda Lopez is a documentary maker, journalist and writer.