1y ago

Rental advertisements should require a floor plan.

Pictures are so often misleading and I just want to rule out places that don't work for me.

It would save the renter's, real-estate agent's and landlord's time. Why is it not a requirement?

I'm also fairly sure a floor plan must exist for things like apartment buildings, just you're not allowed to request it from the City of Melbourne unless you're approved by the owner :/

10 comments

We need national laws for all real estate.
Houses to be advertised with a price
Sold prices must be provided against sold listings
rentals to have a floor plan and total size
body corp listings must list body corp and sinking fund details, minutes to meetings and bylaws.
- A hard independent building inspection requirement
  Harsher fines for landlords illegally keeping bonds
  Harsher penalties for illegal evictions, including confiscation of property
  Stricter licencing requirements for real estate agents
  Amalgamation of the various real estate industry bodies into a proper national regulatory body.
  
  Third party mandated inspections for all properties listed for lease would cause some delightful dumpster fires
- Hmm my only fear with that is that we would be dragged down to the lowest common denominator. Could you imagine what would happen if the federal coalition was in charge of administering the rental market?!
  But I’ll add:
  Mandatory certification for being able to rent housing out, revoked if a building is not suitable or if repeated misconduct occurs.

I'm with you on this but I doubt the incentives are there for the agents to chase up the owner / strata company for these plans.
Have you tried searching for the same address in the buy section of realestate.com.au? There are a lot of properties that have recently sold that still have images from when it was sold which includes a floor plan.
- this is what I had to resort to when I was sharehousing.
- Could just require a copy of the plans when filing a title.
- Thanks for the suggestion, unfortunately many of the ones I want to find are "no longer listed" and the internet archive didn't have any snapshots.

++ with the exact section you will be renting highlighted.
Too many properties are listed by the number of rooms of the entire property, not the section you will be renting.

I would like to see mandatory upgrades of hot water / heating / cooling. I have been looking at many places recently and there's no incentive for the landlord to upgrade the inefficient systems because the tenant pays the cost.

10 comments