Deposit damage disputes — what evidence actually counts

Once a tenant contests a deduction, the argument stops being about who remembers the flat correctly. It becomes about what you can show. And under South Africa's Rental Housing Act a landlord who wants to keep part of a deposit has to show three separate things: that what they're claiming for is damage rather than fair wear and tear, that the tenant (or someone the tenant let in) caused it, and that the amount they're deducting is a real, reasonable cost. A piece of evidence is only useful to the extent it answers one of those. That's the lens worth reading the rest of this with.

So the honest question isn't "what evidence do I need" in the abstract — it's which evidence speaks to which of those three points, and where each kind quietly runs out of road.

What a deduction dispute is really about

Section 4(5) of the Act sets the landlord's side of it: on termination, a landlord is entitled to receive the property back in a good state of repair, save for fair wear and tear, and to claim compensation for damage caused by the tenant — or by a member of the tenant's household, or a visitor the tenant let in. So the first two questions come straight from the statute. Is this damage, or is it the ordinary ageing of a lived-in home that the Act specifically excludes? And was it caused during this tenancy, by this tenant's household, rather than something that was already there or happened after they left?

The third question is about the money. When a landlord applies a deposit to repairs, section 5(3)(g) limits that to the reasonable cost of repairing damage caused during the lease period (plus things like replacing lost keys). And the Act doesn't leave "reasonable" to the landlord's word: sections 5(3)(h) and 5(3)(n) require the receipts for those costs to be available to the tenant to inspect, as proof of what was actually spent. Read together, that's a fairly demanding evidentiary standard hiding in a statute most people never open — damage, causation, and proven reasonable cost, each established, not asserted.

Grading the evidence you'll actually have

Most of what lands in a deposit dispute is one of five things. They don't carry equal weight, and it helps to be clear-eyed about what each one does and doesn't settle before you lean on it:

The comparison is the evidence — not the photo

A single dated photo of a cracked basin proves the basin was cracked on the day you took it. On its own that settles nothing, because the whole dispute is about change: was it like that when the tenant arrived? This is why the Act reads two joint inspections into every lease — one before move-in to record the starting condition (section 5(3)(e)), one in the last three days to check what changed (section 5(3)(f)). The move-out photo only means something held up against its move-in twin. A drawer of unpaired pictures is a slideshow; a matched pair with two dates is an argument.

There's a hard edge to this that catches landlords out. If the landlord never did the joint inspection in the tenant's presence, section 5(3)(j) treats that as an acknowledgement the place came back in a good and proper state of repair — no further claim, full deposit plus interest returned. So the absence of that record isn't a neutral gap; it actively counts against the deduction. The inspections themselves are their own subject — our guide on the incoming and outgoing inspection walks through what each one is for.

Proving the cost, not just the damage

Landlords tend to over-invest in proving the damage and under-invest in proving the number, and disputes often turn on the number. Because sections 5(3)(h) and (n) make the repair receipts something the tenant is entitled to inspect, a deduction backed by a dated invoice or a written quote sits on far firmer ground than a round figure someone arrived at. A quote from a third party also quietly answers the "reasonable" question that a self-estimate can't.

The place this goes wrong is charging new-for-old. Replacing a whole scuffed carpet and billing the tenant for a brand-new one isn't recovering a loss — it's an upgrade at the tenant's expense, and it collides with the fair-wear-and-tear line the Act draws in section 4(5). The defensible claim is the cost of putting right the damage the tenancy actually caused, not the cost of a better flat than the one you let. That's a matter of accepted practice as much as statute, but it's where thin, inflated claims tend to come apart.

What a good file can't do

A good file has limits, and it helps nobody to pretend otherwise: a well-kept set of records doesn't decide the matter by itself. If the two sides can't agree, either can take it — at no cost — to their provincial Rental Housing Tribunal, and a Tribunal ruling carries the weight of a magistrate's court order (section 13). A Tribunal weighs what's in front of it. Strong evidence makes your version the more plausible one and narrows what there is to argue about; it doesn't hand you the result before anyone has looked. Matched photos and a signed report make a cracked basin hard to wave away — they still don't, on their own, prove whose elbow did it.

Which is the practical test for everything you keep during a tenancy: assemble the file as though you'll one day have to hand it to someone who wasn't there and let it speak without you. Dated, matched, signed, costed. In a real dispute, that's exactly what happens — and the landlords who keep their deductions are the ones whose file can carry the argument on its own. If you want the capture side of that done well, the photography guide covers how to shoot inspection photos that still mean something months later, and the deposit guide covers heading the fight off before it starts. Both sit within the Rental Inspection Toolkit, alongside the rest of the inspection workflow.