Found Mould in a Rental: What Queensland Tenants Can Do

Mould in a rental sits awkwardly. You are the one living with it, and in most cases you are not the one who can fix the cause. That gap is where nearly all of the frustration comes from, and it is also where doing 3 or 4 fairly unglamorous things, in the right order, changes how the whole conversation goes.

I clean homes across Brisbane's north, a lot of them rented, and the pattern repeats. The tenant scrubs the spot, it returns 3 weeks later, and by the time anyone raises it formally there is no record of what it looked like or how long it had been going on. If you want the background on why damp turns up in so many homes here, I have written about that separately in mould and damp in Brisbane homes. This article is about the renting part.

Photograph it before you clean it

Do this first. Cleaning removes the evidence, and if the moisture source is still there the mould returns anyway, so you have lost the record and gained nothing.

Take a wide shot that makes the room and the wall obvious, then move closer. A tight photo of a grey patch could be anywhere. Include something in frame that gives scale and location: a window, a doorway, a power point.

• Wide, medium and close shots of each affected area, with the date captured.
• Anything that hints at a source: a water stain on a ceiling, a puddle on a window sill, a lifting silicone bead, a rusting window frame, a soft or swollen skirting board.
• The exhaust fan, if there is one. Note whether it runs, and whether it is moving any air (hold a square of toilet paper against it and see if it holds).
• Recurrences. If you clean an area and it reappears, photograph it again with the new date. A sequence of dated photos says far more than a single image.

Keep the original files rather than only sending compressed copies to an agent. Originals carry their own date information.

Report it in writing, and keep your own copy

A phone call is easy and it leaves no trace. Email, the agent's tenant portal, or a written notice gives you something you can point at later. If you do speak to someone by phone, follow up with a short email confirming what was discussed and when.

Keep the language factual and unexcited. Where it is, when you first noticed it, whether it has spread, what you have observed about conditions in that room, and a request that the cause be investigated. Attach the photos. Resist the urge to diagnose the building in the message. Describing what you can see is stronger than asserting a cause you cannot confirm.

Store your own copies somewhere you control. Portals get replaced, agencies change hands, and portal access usually disappears with the tenancy. An email folder or a dated folder on your own device is enough.

Building fault or day-to-day conditions

This distinction usually drives who is responsible, so it is worth understanding even though the final call is not yours or mine to make. Broadly, the split is between the building failing and how the home is being run.

Things that point toward the building itself:

• An active leak: roof, plumbing, a failed flexible hose, water tracking from a neighbouring wall.
• Failed shower waterproofing, which often shows up on the other side of the shower wall rather than in the bathroom.
• No exhaust fan in a bathroom or laundry, a fan that has stopped working, or a fan that vents into the roof cavity instead of outside.
• Blocked or absent subfloor ventilation, failed gutters and downpipes, ground levels sitting above floor level.
• Perished window seals, or condensation forming inside a wall cavity. New builds are not exempt. Condensation inside steel-framed cavities is a known failure mode and it is invisible from the room.

Things that sit on the occupant side of the line:

• Drying laundry indoors, which adds more moisture to the air than almost anything else a household does.
• Not running the exhaust fan during and after showers, or showering with the door closed and the fan off.
• Keeping the home sealed up for long stretches with no air movement at all.
• Furniture pushed hard against external walls, and wardrobes packed so tightly that air cannot move behind the clothes.
• Unflued gas heating, which produces water vapour as it burns.

In practice the 2 buckets overlap constantly. A bathroom with a dead fan and 2 people taking long showers is both. That is exactly why the building-side observations are worth documenting: it is far easier to demonstrate that a fan does not work than to argue in the abstract about ventilation habits. Moisture is generated inside the home by cooking, showering, drying laundry and simply breathing, not just delivered by the weather, and a building is meant to cope with normal living.

What is reasonable for a tenant to clean

Non-porous surfaces are fair game. Tiles, glass, mirrors, painted sills, powder-coated frames, plastic. Cloth, detergent, warm water, effort. The goal is physical removal, not killing anything. Whether the growth is alive is beside the point, because dead mould and dormant spores still sit there and still matter. Rinse, dry the surface properly, and either bin the cloth or wash it hot and separately.

Porous materials are a different matter. Plasterboard, ceiling linings, silicone beads, grout that has gone soft, carpet, unsealed timber. Growth in those extends below the surface, so wiping the top gives you a clean-looking surface and an unchanged problem. How far it goes depends on the material and the extent, and sometimes the material has to come out. That is a repair conversation. Report it and leave it. There is more detail on the surface-by-surface approach in how to remove mould from walls.

Bleach deserves a specific mention because it is still the default advice everywhere. It removes colour extremely well, which is the problem: on a porous surface the patch vanishes and the growth stays. It is also mostly water, so you are adding moisture to something that exists because of moisture. I do not use it, and I would not suggest a tenant reach for it either.

A surface that looks clean and a surface that is clean are different results. Bleach reliably delivers the first one.

The things you can influence while you wait

Repairs take time, and none of the following resolves a genuine building fault. What they do is slow the problem down and show that the home is being run sensibly. Moisture, food and time cannot be removed from a home, but every one of them can be influenced.

• Dry any water event within hours, not days. Given the right conditions mould can begin growing in around 48 hours, so a wet carpet left over a weekend is a different situation by Monday.
• Run exhaust fans during showers and for 20 minutes afterwards, not just while you are in there.
• Dry laundry outside wherever possible. A load drying in a closed room puts a great deal of water into the air with nowhere for it to go.
• Aim for relative humidity roughly between 40 and 65 percent. A cheap hygrometer tells you more about your home than any amount of guessing.
• Leave a gap behind furniture on external walls, and do not pack wardrobes solid.
• Wipe window condensation in the morning rather than letting it sit on the sill and soak into the frame.
• Keep dust and clutter down. Dust feeds growth, clutter blocks airflow, and both hide early signs until they are no longer early.

If you use a dehumidifier, maintain it. Filters and reservoirs need regular cleaning or the unit becomes a moisture and growth source in its own right. Bathrooms in particular come back again and again for reasons that have nothing to do with how hard you scrubbed, which I have covered in why bathroom mould keeps coming back.

Where the Residential Tenancies Authority fits

The Residential Tenancies Authority is the Queensland government body for residential tenancies. It provides free information for tenants and lessors, publishes the standard forms, and offers a free dispute resolution service if a matter cannot be sorted out directly. Tenancy advice services and community legal centres also operate in Queensland and can talk through a specific situation with you.

What all of them will want is a record. Dates, written communication, photographs, and what was requested and when. Everything earlier in this article is really just building that record while the problem is current, rather than reconstructing it 6 months later from memory.

Colour and smell will not tell you much

2 beliefs cause a lot of unnecessary alarm and a lot of unnecessary reassurance, so both are worth correcting.

Colour tells you almost nothing. The same species can present differently depending on the surface it is growing on, and some moulds are effectively transparent. Black mould is a colour, not a species. Identification requires a laboratory, and it is not something you or I can do by looking. Separately, mould does not have to be visible or have a smell. Most significant problems have no odour at all, and nose blindness sets in within days of living with one, so absence of smell is not reassurance either. For the evidence rather than the folklore, black mould: what the evidence says goes into it.

Moving in, and moving out

The entry condition report is the single best opportunity you get, and most people rush it. Look behind the toilet, under both sink cabinets, along the bottom of window reveals, at the back wall of built-in wardrobes, behind the bathroom door, and at the ceiling directly above the shower. Note anything you find in the report itself, photograph it, and keep your copy. Mould recorded on day 1 is a very different conversation from mould discovered at the exit inspection.

If you want a second set of eyes on a home you are already renting, a Home Health Review is where I walk the property and point out where conditions are favouring moisture and mould, along with what is worth changing in how the home is run. To be clear about what that is and is not: it is a cleaner's observations, not a formal inspection, not testing, sampling or moisture readings, and it carries no standing in a tenancy matter. For that you would engage a suitably qualified assessor, who can measure moisture levels, look at the building fabric properly, and produce a report you can hand to an agent.