Free Landlord Seminars

May 2013

Business & Productivity, Events, News

Why are you in small business? Is property investment one of your goals? Great to see Department of Commerce in WA run a series of FREE Landlord Seminars across Perth to inform private landlords of changes to Residential Tenancy laws.
We attended the Joondalup Seminar on Thursday, 23rd May at the Joondalup Arena – and it was sold out! Even so there were many people who ended up having to stand at the back because there were not enough chairs. The good thing about it is that Joondalup was the first one in the series. So, if you’re quick, you might still get into one of the other scheduled seminars –

• Midland – Thursday 6th June 2013 – Midland Sports Complex
• Perth – Thursday 13th June – City West Function Centre
• Fremantle – Thursday 20th June – Fremantle Sailing Club

It is essential that you register to attend – either online at http://www.commerce.wa.gov.au/landlords or call 1300 30 40 54. They will confirm your registration on arrival before you can be admitted. Doors open at 6pm for registration and the seminar will start at 6.30pm and finish at 7.30pm.
I strongly recommend you turn up at 6pm – even though we’d registered the room was practically full by the time we got there and our copies of the handouts had already been taken off our chairs by others! Also, it ran over time a bit so don’t schedule something straight afterwards if you can help it. Perhaps they learned something from the Joondalup seminar and will handle the questions from the floor differently.
The information presented was good and essential for private landlords to know about the changes to the laws. The sorts of things covered included new residential tenancy agreements; tenant information; property condition reports; security bonds; locks and security; and changes around the timing of rent increases, routine inspections and urgent repairs.
The new laws take effect on 1st July 2013 so it’s important to know what takes effect straight away, what won’t take effect until you write a new tenancy agreement, and what you have a bit of time to put into place. All the information is available online however I would thoroughly recommend attending the seminar to other private landlords.