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Introduction and Highlights
Chapter 1 - Creating a Fairer Market
Chapter 2 - Addressing marketplace issues
- New initiatives in residential accommodation
- Advertising the price of real estate
- New family violence laws
- Addressing issues in domestic building
- Prostitution
- Itinerant traders
- Clarifying warranties and refunds
- Car park ‘fines’
- Responding to the economic downturn
- Good research makes good policy
- Other emerging issues
- Managing changes to conveyancing
Chapter 3 - Creating caring and confident communities
- Advice for consumers
- Support for vulnerable consumers
- Educating young consumers
- Helping Indigenous consumers
- Helping newly-arrived migrants
- Helping consumers with a disability
- Helping senior consumers
- Educating consumers about scams
- Working together on consumer issues
- Responding to the bushfire crisis
- Consumer Affairs Victoria online
- Online forms improve access for traders
- Regionalising service delivery
- Services in the CBD
Chapter 4 - Showing leadership in dispute resolution
Chapter 5 - Optimising your capabilities
Appendices
- Print this page
- Download full Annual Report as PDF
- Download Adobe Acrobat Reader
- Previous annual reports
Highlights
- Finalised 11,736 disputes and recovered more than $5.17 million for consumers
- Completed a record number of inspections to help resolve tenancy disputes
- Introduced a new way of conciliating some domestic building disputes, achieving a 94 per cent success rate
- Resolved 81 per cent of general disputes conciliated
Residential Tenancies Bond Authority
The Residential Tenancies Bond Authority (RTBA) is a Victorian Government statutory authority that relies on the staff and resources of the Department of Justice, Consumer Affairs Victoria and external service providers. The Authority helps reduce disputes by holding all residential tenancy bonds in a neutral capacity for landlords and tenants, including for long-term caravan park and rooming house residents. This requirement, part of the Residential Tenancies Act 1997, protects tenants from having their bond misused by unscrupulous landlords or agents.
The RTBA performs numerous transactions, including bond lodgements, bond repayments and transfers. In 2008–09, the Authority registered about 175,000 bond lodgements, and held 426,020 bonds valued at $494.1 million.
The RTBA can only repay bonds where there is agreement between the landlord/agents and tenant, or where the RTBA is directed by the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal or a court. The RTBA repaid approximately 153,000 bonds in 2008–09. Payees received their repayments within 24 hours of the tenant and managing agent agreeing to the bond’s distribution. About 85 per cent of repayments were made by direct credit, and were therefore available in the payee’s bank account on the following business day.
On 30 June 2008, the Authority moved to a new purpose-built processing system, which led to a number of delays and processing issues. However, during the year the service regained target performance levels, processing 99 per cent of all transactions on the same day as the form initiating the transaction and achieving error rates of less than one per cent.
The RTBA is continually improving its services, and in 2008–09:
- enhanced its RTBA Online web service, enabling registered users to download agent bond lists as an Excel spreadsheet or PDF (Portable Document Format)
- simplified the rejection notices provided when a transaction could not be processed
- introduced "Retained Repayments" to better handle bond repayments when the RTBA was unable to issue a direct credit or a cheque
- introduced "Incomplete Lodgements" to ensure all bonds paid to the RTBA were held by the RTBA, even when lodgement details were incomplete.
| Residential Tenancies Bond Authority activity 2008–09 | |
|---|---|
| Bonds lodged | 175,000 |
| Bond repayments | 153,000 |
| Bonds transferred | 38,000 |
| Bonds held | 426,020 |
| Value held | $494.1 million |