A landlord whose tenants owe him $7200 in unpaid rent wants the Jacinta Allan-led Victorian government to make major changes to its rental laws. Right picture: NewsWire/Andrew Henshaw.
A Melbourne landlord whose tenants owe him $7200 is calling for harsher penalties to be imposed on renters who don’t pay rent for months on end.
Vikas Sharma leased his sole investment property, a Sunshine West house, to a married couple in January 2026.
However, the tenants have since failed to pay their rent for four months – or even complete the necessary paperwork to pay their water bills.
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Mr Vikas said he had tried applying to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal for a hearing which would consider whether he could give the tenants a notice to vacate the home, as required under the state’s law.
However, VCAT rejected his request for a hearing based on technical reasons – specifically that his application “does not provide sufficient reasons as it does not set out the section of the Act that gives rise to the grounds to the renter provider to be able to give the renter notice to vacate”.
This was despite Mr Sharma’s application outlining how long his tenants had not been paying rent for, how much money they owe him, and stating the Residential Tenancies Act’s section which covers non-payment of rent.
Mr Sharma is worried that he will end up spending thousands of dollars in legal fees in an attempt to take back his property.
Mr Sharma has since sought legal assistance, only for his lawyer to inform him that it would likely take months to go through the VCAT process to eventually remove the tenants.
The father-of-two said that because of having to pay two mortgages, for his own home and the Sunshine West property in addition to other expenses such as council rates and land tax, that it was becoming difficult to cover other life expenses such as his daughter’s school fees.
He’s been left feeling “hopeless and helpless that I can’t do anything”.
“I’m always in a sad mood, an anxious mood, about what’s going to happen in future,” Mr Sharma said.
“All the time I’m waking up in the middle of night, just thinking about what’s going to happen and much money I will have to pay to the legal team.”
Mr Sharma said he had sought assistance from sources including Consumer Affairs Victoria, the office of the Minister for Housing and Building Harriet Shing, and Rental Dispute Resolution Victoria, to no avail.
Lawyers have warned Mr Sharma that it could take months to get his tenants out of the rental home, by the time the VCAT process wraps up. Picture: Mike Keating/HWT.
He even went to police who told him they could not help as the issue of unpaid rent was a civil matter, not a criminal one.
Mr Sharma said in addition to the Victorian government taking steps to streamline VCAT processes so they could be resolved in a quicker fashion, he would like to see legislation enacted to make non-payment of rent for a period of two to three months classified as a criminal offence in order to speed up a landlords’ ability to take back possession of their rental home.
He said that prior to his experience with these tenants, he and his wife had been thinking about buying another investment property – but now had adopted a stance of “never again in our lives”.
Mr Sharma says that a failure to pay rent for months on end should be a criminal offence.
Mr Sharma is not the only Victorian landlord who has lost thousands of dollars, or even tens of thousands of dollars, due to non-payment of rent.
Melbourne property investor Dan Yeats was left more than $65,000 out of pocket when his now-former tenants failed to pay rent for months and also left his South Morang townhouse in an “unsanitary, unsafe and inhabitable” condition, including bags of rubbish with maggots underneath and cat faeces smeared on the walls.
Separately, nurse Mikaela Cowan is owed $8000 in unpaid rent for her Mill Park property.
In addition, a couple aged 67 and 84 are owed $10,000 in unpaid rent by an ex-tenant who previously lived in their granny flat in Melbourne’s inner north.
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