So here’s a new concept – user pays for water.
We’re doing the right thing watching our water useage. But where is the incentive (or big stick) for our tenants. Maybe there needs to be a wholesale change. Afterall I don’t pay for their electricity.You are perfectly within your rights to charge your tenant for water usage if it metered seperately, and stipulated in the lease agreement. Commercial tenants pay for the water.
Mal
Getting out of your comfort zone, can help you become comfortable
mitm, not use where you are but here in WA most tennants pay for their water usage. Some landlords will go 50/50 during summer months to encourage tennants to keep up the garden/lawns but that’s it. Where the property is equipped with a bore (such as our IP), tennant pays for all water. Pity we can’t pass on the water rates
100% of our tenancies pay 100% of their own water bills.
50% of our tenancies pay for everything else as well to do with the property…except the mortgage of course.
I believe a day will come when residential tenants are required to pay all outgoings…it’ll come one day…you just need to ask yourself if you are prepared to wait before they change the RTA and get rid of those absurd Tenancy Advice bureaus.
We decided we couldn’t wait that long.
I guess you are in this situation because you either didn’t bargain hard enough at the start of the Lease, or just let the caretaker fill in the paperwork for you without paying enough attention to what they were doing. Which one was it ??
Charging for water isn’t a new thing, all our leases are written up that way. Just make sure you get the meter read before and after each tenant.
I’m in WA too, so perhpas it is something that’s normal here only?
Nope,
I’m in Melbourne and it’s perfectly normal here too.
Landt.My tenants pay for the water. Its metered separately.
Kelvin J Brennan
I’m in Melbourne and have to pay for water usage. When I was in ACT I had to pay water as well.
I think you’re being shafted.
Victoria (the state) here again… surely you’re only paying the water rates, and your tenant is paying for usage? In which case, yes, the more they use, the more they’ll pay. Your cost is fixed.
On the broader picture (“oh look, over there, a soap-box!”), I believe that water should be much more expensive than it currently is. I say remove water restrictions where they currently exist and charge for metered use on an exponential sliding scale, beginning at roughly 10x the current rate in Vic.
Why? Because our growing cities (SE Aus/WA) are draining our water storage, infrastructure and capacity. We need to invest heavily in these areas to ‘drought proof’ ourselves. Yet as storage levels decline, the government/s have been enabled to stick their heads in the sand and simply restrict water useage by a public who believes that:
a) building/expanding dams is environmentally immoral
b) washing the car from a bucket & catching the wasted cold water from the first few shower seconds is a long-term solution to a growing problem.Higher water charges would:
a) dissuade wasteful use
b) enable expenditure on infrastructure & new technologies
c) show the ‘no dams’ brigade the effect of limiting the supply of a necessary commodity.Cheers, F.[cowboy2]
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