Challenging pet un-friendly accommodation: An exploration of negotiating multispecies rental accommodation

This project qualitatively explores how stakeholders (landlords, advocates, housing providers and other frontline workers) and tenants negotiate and experience pet-friendly housing in order to inform better pet-friendly housing policies and practices. The chosen research site (South Australia) is governed by ‘pet un-friendly’ policy, which sees landlords and other housing providers largely able to reject multispecies families without consequence. The partner organisation on this project has been working on the frontlines of assisting tenants with animal companions to secure housing through advocacy, mediation, application support and facilitating stakeholder-tenant negotiations. The proposed project, then, is well-placed to inform understandings of both the lived experience and successful challenging of negotiating rental accommodation by and for multispecies families. The proposed research has three main objectives:

(1) To understand how landlords, housing providers and other stakeholders negotiate pet friendly housing, including the challenges and facilitators of providing pet-friendly housing.
(2) To understand how tenants with pets experience the processes of finding and occupying accommodation, including the challenges, benefits and impacts on human-animal relationships that occur as a result of this.
(3) To explore potential improvements to policy and practice that would better support the effective housing of tenants with pets, including risk mitigation for stakeholders and negotiation of tenancy arrangements.

Pet-rental scholarship is currently an underexplored area. The proposed project, bolstered by its ties to the uniquely situated partner organisation, will contribute much needed research on the challenges and facilitators of navigating pet-friendly accommodation in a pet-restrictive regulatory context.