Built for people who never set out to be landlords.
You took on the farm, not a property portfolio. But the moment a house comes with the job, you’re a landlord under the Residential Tenancies Act — with the same obligations as anyone letting a flat in town, and none of the systems. That’s the gap we fill.
Your tenant is also your employee.
That single fact changes everything about how farm accommodation has to be handled. In town, a difficult tenancy is a difficult tenancy. Here, the person you’re disagreeing about a carpet with is the person you need in the shed at five the next morning, and will still be there for the rest of the season.
It makes documentation more important, not less. When both sides agreed the record up front, there’s nothing to argue about later — and the working relationship survives the conversation. When nobody wrote anything down, a small disagreement becomes personal very quickly.
It also makes tact part of the job. We give proper notice, we turn up when we said we would, and we treat the house as somebody’s home rather than an asset being audited.
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You must supply your compliance records to a tenant on request — which means having them in the first place.
rent
A written tenancy agreement is still required where accommodation is provided free as part of the job.
exemption
The healthy homes standards apply to farm accommodation exactly as they apply to a rental in town.
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Minimum written notice to end a service tenancy when the employment ends.
Dairy farms
Multiple houses, multiple staff, and a whole team turning over on the same day each year.
Dairy is where we do most of our work and where we’ve built the process around your season rather than a property manager’s calendar.
The pattern is always the same. Contracts are signed in the spring, nothing happens for months, and then the last fortnight of May arrives and four houses have to be emptied, checked and refilled in a week — usually while you’re still milking. Inspections are the first thing to fall off the list and the thing you most wish you’d done when a bond claim comes up in October.
We schedule your whole property as a single run: exits as the houses empty, entries before the new people arrive, reports out before the new team has finished unpacking. One phone call in March instead of five in May.
What a dairy farm usually books
Quoted together, scheduled as one visit.
- Routine inspections quarterly, to satisfy the insurance condition
- Healthy homes assessments on any house that’s never been documented
- One travel charge for the whole visit rather than one per house
Sheep and beef
Usually one or two cottages rather than a row of them, often older, and often overlooked until something goes wrong.
- An entry inspection when a new staff member arrives — the record everything else is measured against
- A healthy homes assessment once, to establish and document the position
- Routine inspections quarterly where the insurance requires it
- Rent-ready advice before advertising, if the cottage has been empty a while
What we keep in mind
- The cash flow cycle is different here
- You don’t need a service built for someone with ten houses
- Proportionate, not over-serviced
- The same standard of record either way
Why it still matters
- The obligations are identical with one cottage or nine
- The house has been there longer than anyone remembers
- Nobody has ever written down its condition
- The cost of meeting the rules shouldn’t scale with your worry
Self-managing landlords
You manage your own rental and you’d rather keep it that way.
You’re happy dealing with your tenant, you know a good plumber, and you don’t want to hand over a slice of the rent for the privilege of someone else doing what you already do well.
What you may not want to do is the inspection itself — the photographs, the 100-point walk-through, the written report, the awkwardness of assessing someone’s home while they stand there. That part is easier when it comes from an independent third party who isn’t also the person collecting the rent.
Book us for the inspections and keep the rest. We’re not going to try to talk you into full management.
The six conversations we have most.
People rarely ring us asking for a service. They ring with a situation.
“The whole team changes on 1 June.”
Four houses, one week, and no time to do it yourself. We schedule the exits and entries as a single run and get the reports out before the new team arrives.
“Someone’s leaving and the house is a mess.”
Book the exit inspection when you give notice, not after they’ve gone. We document it properly and separate fair wear and tear from what’s actually chargeable.
“My insurer asked when I last inspected.”
Most landlord policies carry a quarterly inspection condition, and it’s the tenant-related claims that fall over when you can’t show you’ve met it.
“A staff member asked for our healthy homes records.”
You’ve got 21 days to produce them. If they don’t exist yet, an assessment is the fastest way to close the gap properly rather than improvise.
“I’m advertising the job next month.”
An hour on site tells you what the house needs before you show it to an applicant — and while it’s still empty and cheap to fix.
“We’ve never done any of this.”
That’s most people. Start with one entry inspection and a healthy homes assessment on one house. It’s a much smaller job than it feels like from the outside.
We’d rather tell you now than waste your time.
Not everyone who lands on this page is someone we can help properly.
- Farm accommodation provided as part of an employment agreement
- Properties in Central Otago — Alexandra, Cromwell, Clyde, Roxburgh, the Maniototo and surrounds
- Livestock farms with permanent staff housing, particularly dairy
- Self-managing landlords who want inspections done independently
- Anyone who wants the documentation done properly rather than quickly
- Properties outside Central Otago — we’d rather refer you on than over-promise on travel
- Seasonal or short-stay worker accommodation, which sits under different rules
- Full property management, which is a different service
- Repairs and compliance work, which we refer to trades rather than doing ourselves
Not sure which side of that you fall on? Ring us. If we’re not the right people we’ll usually know who is.
Before you call.
How many houses do I need to make this worth doing?
One. A single cottage still carries the full set of obligations, and a single entry inspection is a perfectly normal booking. Having several houses changes the economics — travel is charged once for the visit rather than per house — but it isn’t a condition of working with us.
We’ve never documented anything. Is it too late?
No. Start where you are. The next inspection you do becomes the baseline for everything after it, and the gap closes from that point. Most of the farms we work with started exactly here.
Will this make things awkward with my staff?
Handled properly, it usually does the opposite. Your staff member gets a documented record of the house they moved into, 14 days to add anything they disagree with, and an independent person to mention the broken latch to. The awkwardness comes from having no record, not from having one.
How far do you travel?
We work across Central Otago from our office in Alexandra. Travel is charged at $1.29 per kilometre one way, with no free radius, so you know the cost up front. If you’re not sure whether you’re in our patch, give us a call.
Tell us what you’ve got.
How many houses, where you are, and what’s coming up. We’ll tell you honestly what’s worth doing and what isn’t, and quote the lot.