KEY POINTS:
The Government's proposal to put Tenancy Tribunal rulings online is a blow to a tenant checking and debt-recovery business which provides services to the rental property market.
Geoff King, managing director of Tenancy Information NZ, said the move for tribunal rulings to go online would undermine his business.
Court rulings on disputes involving the 464,000 residential rental properties occupied by the country's 1.2 million tenants are about to become public for the first time in the next few weeks.
The new national database will allow landlords to compile lists of bad tenants and will expose those who damage houses and flats of the $153 billion national rental pool or refuse to pay the rent.
It will also alert good tenants to bad landlords and allow flatmates to check each other.
During the last decade, King has amassed a specialist database to provide information on more than 30,000 tenants. Landlords pay to use his service to check prospective tenants. He said his business had the country's largest privately owned tenancy register.
In 1993, King also founded Chase Investigative Agencies, a licensed investigator and debt collector specialising in recovering unpaid rent for landlords.
He questioned the Government's decision to put the tribunal's rulings online, saying he would have paid to get the rulings and provide them to the rental sector.
"Why is the Government trying to reinvent the wheel? There are already tenant checking systems in place in the private arena via Tenancy Information NZ and Baycorp," King said.
"The Government could have saved the taxpayer a lot of money and given access to the information to these two companies, which have a financial interest in selling the information," he said.
Sale of the information to the two businesses would have helped cover annual costs of the tribunal, he said.
Many of its decisions came too late to be much help to landlords.
Tenancy Tribunal
* Established 21 years ago by the Residential Tenancies Act 1986.
* Rulings are public but only parties to an action usually get written copies.
* Gets 47,000 applications a year, of which two-thirds are resolved by mediation.
* About 16,000 decisions a year are made by the tribunal.
* These are mainly brought by landlords against tenants for unpaid rent or damage.
* Decisions are about to go online, delighting landlords but worrying tenants.
