An investor in a St Heliers apartment received a Healthy Homes compliance notice from Tenancy Services. The notice related to the ventilation standard — the bathroom extraction fan in her unit was inadequate. She assumed the body corporate was responsible for building-wide compliance. Her body corporate manager assumed it was the owner's problem. Four months later — after the Tenancy Tribunal awarded her tenant compensation — a solicitor confirmed what both parties had been avoiding finding out: the Healthy Homes Standards are the landlord's responsibility, even in a body corporate building.
The Healthy Homes Standards apply to all residential tenancies in New Zealand, including apartments and units within body corporate developments. This creates a complexity that doesn't exist with standalone houses: the building's shared systems and the owner's individual unit are separate, and responsibility for compliance sits with different parties depending on which element is involved.
The six standards are: heating (a specified minimum heating capacity for the main living area), insulation (ceiling and underfloor, where applicable), ventilation (extraction fans in kitchens and bathrooms, openable windows), moisture and drainage (ground moisture barriers where relevant, drainage functioning correctly), draught stopping (blocking unreasonable gaps), and moisture ingress (the building not having structural moisture problems).
In a body corporate context, heating, insulation and ventilation are generally the landlord's responsibility — these relate to the unit itself. A heat pump in the living room, insulation in the ceiling and floor where accessible, and working extraction fans are the owner's obligation to ensure are present and functional.
Where it gets complicated: insulation in apartment buildings is often embedded in the shared structure. Ceiling insulation between two floors is in a space that may be technically common property. Underfloor insulation in a ground-floor unit may be within the building structure that the body corporate maintains. Who is responsible for installing or maintaining insulation in these spaces is genuinely ambiguous in many buildings, and the answer depends on how the unit boundaries are drawn in the body corporate's rules.
The ventilation standard catches apartment owners out most frequently. Modern apartments often have mechanical ventilation systems that serve the whole building, and these systems are typically maintained by the body corporate. But the extraction fan in your bathroom — even if it vents through a shared duct — is usually your responsibility as the owner to ensure is functioning. If the body corporate's shared system is the bottleneck (a blocked shared duct, for example), the lines of responsibility become shared.
For landlords: the safest approach is to check your unit against all six standards before a tenancy starts, get a Healthy Homes assessment if you aren't certain, and address any gaps promptly. If a gap involves the building structure or a shared system, raise it with the body corporate in writing at the same time — both so they can address their part of it and so you have a record that you flagged it.
For committees: proactive building-wide assessment of the shared systems relevant to the Healthy Homes Standards — ventilation ducting, moisture barriers, common area heating — is worth doing. Some of these are things the body corporate is responsible for regardless of the tenancy obligations on individual owners. Getting ahead of it costs less than fixing it after a complaint.
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