Quinovic property management has been caught asking landlords whether prospective tenants previously had pets - a practice that appears designed to circumvent New Zealand's new laws allowing tenants to have pets, according to archived website evidence and tenant reports.

This is classic New Zealand housing story - new tenant-friendly laws being undermined by property managers finding creative workarounds. It shows how hard it is to shift power dynamics in the rental market even when the law changes, and it's part of the broader housing crisis conversation.

The company edited its website after being called out for encouraging practices that violate Human Rights and Privacy laws, including requesting photos that enable discrimination.

Here's how the workaround operates: instead of asking tenants directly whether they have pets - which would be illegal under the new tenancy laws - property managers ask previous landlords whether the tenant had pets during their tenancy.

Technically, that's not asking the tenant. Practically, it achieves exactly the same result: identifying and excluding pet owners from rental properties.

One landlord shared a reference template from Oxygen Property Management on Reddit that included the question: "Did the tenant have any pets?" The same questionnaire included perfectly legitimate questions like "Did the tenant maintain the property well? Were there any major damages or maintenance issues?"

So why the specific pet question if you're already asking about damages and maintenance? Because the goal isn't to assess whether the tenant was responsible - it's to filter out pet owners regardless of their tenancy history.

New Zealand changed its tenancy laws to allow pets specifically because blanket "no pets" policies were excluding responsible tenants and contributing to housing insecurity. The law recognizes that pet ownership is common and shouldn't be a barrier to finding housing.

But property managers are fighting back with procedural workarounds. Quinovic's website previously encouraged tenants to provide photos with their applications - a practice that enables unlawful discrimination based on ethnicity, age, gender, disability, or family status under the Human Rights Act.

After being called out on Reddit several weeks ago, Quinovic quietly edited its website to remove the most obviously problematic advice. The updated page drops the photo request and some other invasive questions.

There's also been suspicious editing of Quinovic Vivian Street Google reviews, in an apparent attempt to bury negative feedback about the company's practices.

The broader pattern here is property managers adapting to tenant-friendly law changes by finding procedural workarounds that technically comply with the letter of the law while violating its spirit.

Asking previous landlords about pets? Not technically illegal. But it achieves the same discriminatory outcome that the law was designed to prevent. It's the rental market equivalent of literacy tests used to disenfranchise voters - technically neutral, practically discriminatory.

For tenants, this is exhausting. You follow the rules, you don't bring up your pet in the application, you assume you're being judged on your merits as a tenant. Then you find out property managers are calling your previous landlord and asking about pets anyway.

The solution needs to be regulatory. The Tenancy Tribunal or Privacy Commissioner should clarify that asking previous landlords about pets constitutes discrimination just as much as asking tenants directly. Otherwise, the law change is meaningless - property managers will just route around it.

Mate, New Zealand's rental market is already brutal enough without property managers gaming the system to exclude responsible tenants because they happen to have a cat. The law says tenants can have pets. Property managers need to accept that and judge tenants on what actually matters: whether they pay rent and look after the place.