How this is made

RentingOnRecord is built from a research sweep, not from someone’s experience. This page describes exactly what that means, including the parts that are weak.

Every claim carries its own evidence

A claim only appears here if it came with a direct quote from a named source. The quote is on the page, one click from the claim. If a claim’s only evidence turned out to be the title of the page it cited - which proves which document was read and nothing about what it says - the claim was dropped rather than published.

Claims are separated by what kind of thing they are

The single most useful distinction on this site is between what an operator has documented and what the field merely repeats. They are never mixed together.

Documented position: What the body that runs or defines the thing says in its own documentation.
Measured finding: Something someone actually measured, with the method attached.
Practical effect: What is observed to happen in practice, as distinct from what is documented.
Changed on: A dated change. This is where advice quietly stops being true.
Disputed between sources: Sources that do not agree, presented without picking a winner.
Repeated, with no primary source in reach: Widely repeated in the field. Within the documents this sweep read, it traces only to other repetitions - which is a fact about our reading as well as about the idea, until each one has been searched for on its own.

Sources are graded by who published them

The grade is about who is speaking, never about whether they are right. A vendor study with a named method and a real sample is better evidence than a trade-press summary of it; the grade just tells you whose incentive is in the room.

first party: The operator of the thing being described, or the body that defines it.
trade press: A publication reporting on the field.
vendor: A company selling something in the field it is describing.
other: Anything else, including personal sites and archives.

Repeated ideas get looked up, one at a time

Some claims here are repetitions: a named publication said something, and no primary source came with the quote. That is a fact about what this site has read, not about the idea, and treating the two as the same thing would be the worst mistake available to a site like this one. So each repeated idea gets checked on its own - the results are here.

Checking means going and looking for the source: the operator’s own documentation, the original study, the paper, the dataset. Following the trail backwards through the retellings until it lands somewhere primary or runs out. Four things can come back. A primary source says it. A primary source says the OPPOSITE. A real source exists but says something narrower than the retelling. Or the trail ends in another retelling and nothing else.

Every one of those carries what was searched, and so does the page. A “we found nothing” with no search behind it reads exactly like a thorough one, so the searches are shown and you can judge whether they were any good. If you know the source we missed, that is the most useful thing you can send us.

What this does not do

It is not legal advice, and it is not about your tenancy. Renting law turns on facts this site does not have - your agreement, its dates, what was said and when - so a rule stated correctly here can still be the wrong rule for you. Tenants Victoria, Consumer Affairs Victoria and Victoria Legal Aid advise on individual disputes; this site does not.
Absence of a claim is not evidence of absence. If a subject has three claims, that means three survived, not that three exist in the world.
The grounding check catches invention, not every overstatement. Tested adversarially, it reliably rejects fabricated numbers and events. It is more permissive about a summary that says “always” where the claims only support“since 2015”.
Dates are the date of the evidence, not the date a thing became true. A claim dated 2016 may have been true for years before, and may have quietly stopped being true since.
Refused claims are not necessarily false. They are claims whose evidence did not support them as written. Several are probably true and badly sourced.
“No source found” is not “no source exists”. It means a search was run and came back empty, on the date shown. Sources get published, and a negative ages faster than a positive one.

Corrections

If a claim here is wrong, or its quote does not say what the claim says, that is a defect worth fixing. Every claim carries its source so you can check it, which is the point. The full source list is here.