Office of the Privacy Commissioner | Data privacy in the rental sector: September 2022 Insights Report
For this report we with Consumer to investigate how our guidance for landlords and tenants is being implemented by property managers.
In 2021, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) introduced guidance to clarify expectations for landlord and property manager collection, handling and use, and destruction of renters’ personal data. As privacy regulator, OPC also published a parallel compliance and monitoring strategy aimed at identifying the extent to which property managers are complying with the new guidance.
This research report forms part of this compliance and monitoring strategy. The purpose of this research report is to investigate how these new rules are being implemented by property managers, given the imbalance of market power and the tendency of renters not to complain. A further goal of this study is to obtain qualitative insight into how market conditions in New Zealand’s rental property sector are influencing the exchange of personal data in the rental sector.
Read a copy of ‘Data privacy in the rental sector’ (opens to PDF, 1848KB).
Who rents?
In 2022, 1.6 million New Zealanders rent (Stats NZ). This translates to approximately one-third of all New Zealanders, or roughly the equivalent to the population of Auckland. This figure includes roughly 120,000 children under five years of age. Pacific peoples and Māori are less likely to own their home or hold it in a family trust compared with other ethnic groups (Stats NZ, 2020).