The Tribunal is not rigged, you just showed up with the wrong game plan 😬
On one of my airport pickups, I ended up in Manukau.
Not the airport.
Manukau.
As I stared at Rainbow’s End, I wondered out loud, “When did they move the airport?”
At that moment, it didn’t even occur to me that I had gone the wrong way. I was genuinely convinced someone had moved the airport without telling me.
This is what it looks like when people complain to me about their Tenancy Tribunal experience:
“The system is rigged.”
“The adjudicator hates landlords/tenants.”
“The landlord/tenant is a sly fox.”
It’s always everything and everyone else and never you. I get it. No matter which side of the rental equation you are on, renting is a people business that involves two very intimate and high-stake aspects of a person’s life: someone’s home and someone else’s investment (read: future). That’s deeply personal. And when it goes wrong, we instinctively look without rather than within.
Here’s the thing: the system has its problems for sure. But a lot of the times, it is a little bit you. You had prepared, framed and argue your case in a way that got it to Manukau when you were suppose to get to the airport.
That’s good. Because that means you can fix things.
Here are five of the biggest mistakes I see people make at the Tribunal over and over again.
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Think of it this ways: Photoshop has been around since 1990 so why aren’t we all Picassos?
Powerful tools are wasted in the hands of wannabes. If you don’t understand the basics of the RTA and you don’t know how to properly prompt AI, you will end up with generic and long-winded drivel littered with Americanisms, telltale “It is not X, it is Y” sentence structures and the dreaded em-dashes.
When adjudicators look at submissions, they are not impressed by word count and misfired legalese. They are looking for
What happened;
Which legal obligations were in play;
Description of the breach and its effect; and
What remedy you are asking for and how you calculated it
The information has to come from you and can be clearly communicated in plain English.
How to use AI without tanking your case
Decide the narrative bones yourself - Write in bullet points: the key events, the sections you think apply, the remedies you want and the evidence you have
Use AI as an editor and co-pilot, not a brain - Upload the Practice Direction 4/2025 and your draft and ask, “Where does my application fall short of the mandatory information in this Practice Direction? Give me a gap analysis.”
Sense-checking your story - Prompt it with: “Act as a disinterested bystander seeing these facts for the first time. In five clear bullet points, tell me what this submission is saying.” Then ask yourself, “Is this actually what I want to tell the adjudicator?”
Strip out fake legal theatre - If your draft suddenly reads like a script for Suits then rewrite it as: “Section x required the tenant to do X. They did Y.”
Test it on a normal human - Ask a friend to read your submission and ask, “What am I asking the Tribunal to do, and why?” If they cannot answer in two sentences, you need more clarity, not more AI.
AI should handle spell-check, structure, gap-spotting and polish. You are responsible for good judgment and narrative: what happened, what matters and what you want the Tribunal to do about it.
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Tribunal hearings can feel like counselling sessions. They are not.
People often arrive ready to unload years of frustration with long stories about how “destroyed”, “bullied” or “betrayed” they feel, sprinkled with big legal words like “negligence” and “duty of care”. Remember always that while the Tribunal has wide powers in applying contract law, it does not have jurisdiction in the law of tort.
The adjudicator will listen and note the distress before quietly bringing you back on track:
Was there a breach of the Act or the agreement?
What evidence supports that?
What identifiable loss or impact followed?
I regularly see orders involving tenants who claim their house as unsafe and unhealthy but fail to back things up with credible medical evidence or proof of serious defects. These applications usually end up with the claim being cut back to what’s proved: maybe rent reduction for one maintenance issue, not early termination and certainly no five-figure compensation.
I’m not saying don’t feel but manage your feelings strategically. Here’s how to use your feelings while giving the adjudicator a script they can use:
Swap therapy words for Tribunal words. You are not “traumatised”, you simply want the landlord to meet his RTA obligations because he had “failed to repair an increasingly significant leak from 1 March to 15 June despite numerous notices (attached).” You are not concerned with the landlord’s “duty of care”, you simply want her to “meet her s45 obligations”.
Run the three-ticks checklist before you file: Have you clearly named the obligation? Have you attached at least one piece of credible evidence demonstrating the breach? Is the dollar figure you have assigned to the breach proportional and reasonable?
I am not saying they will but train yourself to write in a way that enables the adjudicators to copy and paste: “Because [breach] was not fixed from [date] to [date], I paid $X [for alternative/to remedy myself] and could not [enjoy the ordinary benefits of this tenancy] for [Y days].” That’s literally it.
Reduce the adjudicator’s thinking cost. You want them to be looking at your paragraph and think, “That’s my reasons section done.”
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There is a tendency to go nuclear with applications. It is not uncommon for parties to go to the Tribunal for early termination, full rent refunds, big 5 or 6 figure compe when the evidence only supports a rent reduction, a work order or a modest compensation.
Your job is to look like the adult in the room.
Show you understand the RTA at a practical level (right sections, right notices);
Show you tried to limit your loss once things went wrong (mitigation you can point to); and
Show you are not greedy. Your submission is measured, not grabby.
Bonus point: Leave a good-faith breadcrumb trail by showing contrition and conceding on minor grounds. You are not giving up, you are signalling to the adjudicator that you are the grownup, the person on the other side is the child.
Lead with what you can prove, not what you feel or suspect. Build your core ask around indisputable facts (dated photos, ledgers, invoices etc) and price your remedy to match those facts, for example, targeted rent rebate and fair work orders. Save termination, full rental clawback and big general damages for the rare file where the evidence actually hits those high thresholds.
Adjudicators are bound by s85 to resolve disputes fairly, quickly and based on real merits, not technicality. If you look greedy or heavy-handed, s85 can be relied on to pull you back. If you look proportionate and reasonable, you make it easier for them to land where you want them to land.
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People don’t often lose their Tribunal dispute because they are “wrong”, they lose because the section they are leaning on never actually said what they thought it said.
I see this all the time:
Landlords who think repairs only become real when a tenant emails or texts, even though it is pretty obvious that the chattel has been broken for a long time;
Owners who treat Healthy Homes as a one-off install, then try to run a “here’s an assessment report from 2021” defence in 2025 when the heat pump has been dead for weeks;
Parties playing with fancy bits of the Act, dodging rent increases, break-lease fees, no mitigation, without ever checking the fine print.
On paper, the Tribunal nearly always back the side that has obviously read the section and fitted their claim inside it.
Stop building your case on fiction. Do a 15-minute date with the RTA - Read the section that applies to you and underline each phrase that genuinely matches your facts. If you are explaining more than you are underlying, that’s a red flag that you are forcing the law to fit your story, not the other way around.
The side that can say, “Here’s the section, here are the bits that fits my facts, here’s the remedy that matches that duty,” looks calm and competent. The side quoting an unnamed call-centre operator from Tenancy Services is going to look lost. It’s not hard to figure out who the adjudicator is going to trust.
You don’t need to geek out on the RTA but you do need to have enough contact with its actual words so that you are not asking the Tribunal to do something the Act does not support.
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You know that junk drawer you don’t ever want to look into? Yeah, that one. Make sure your Tribunal application is not a version of that.
Don’t upload 120 photos when 2 will do; choose one clear “before” and one clear “after” shot that tells the story without the noise. And when you’re using screenshots to show how the tenant refused access after lawful notice, don’t upload random chunks so the same messages show up three times across five images; the more you make the adjudicator hop back and forth and re-reading the same content, the quicker you are going to lose them.
Clean up your uploads, build yourself a simple framework of a four-grid story board documenting:
Before - what normal looked like;
What changed - the breach or event;
What they did/didn’t do - their response and timing; and
Impact on me - costs, lost use, time, health.
Keep your bullet point in each grid brief and make sure each point is matched with a piece of evidence you can attach.
When it comes to the quality of your evidence, choose the ones that earns its place in the hearing:
Before: entry photos;
Change: mid-tenancy photos and key complaint emails;
Response: their replies, notices, and dates of action or inaction;
Impact: invoices.
Imagine the adjudicator to be an overworked and tired human with a stack of files. Make your application skimmable. Better you show up with a clear narrative spine that says, “I’ve done your thinking for you.” than an enormous data-dump that screams, “I don’t know what matters.” Help them help you.
Here are just five ways smart people make dumb mistakes at the Tribunal. None of them requires a law degree to fix, just discipline.
For more tailored tips on how to stop winging your Tribunal approach, book a Tribunal Strategy Sprint with me. We’ll work on sharpening your story, your evidence and your application so adjudicators can see the merits of your position quickly and confidently going forward.
I’m lining up a Tribunal masterclass for 2026.
Tell me your #1 Tribunal pet-peeve, the one thing that keeps you up at night before a hearing, I’ll put it on the hit list.
xx
Sarina
