The Scottish Association of Landlords (SAL) says the average time from application to decision has risen from about three months in 2019 to more than eight months in 2025. For rent-arrears evictions, SAL says the debt at the point of decision now averages 14.7 months’ rent, up from 8.7 months in 2019.
Those are industry figures rather than independently audited tribunal statistics. But official data point in the same direction: a Scottish Parliament briefing on petition PE2180 records an average of 191.62 days – just over six months – from a private landlord’s eviction application to the first hearing between April 2024 and May 2025.
The figure covered 1,563 applications and included statutory response periods.
Aberdein Considine says legal costs can reach about £10,000 before a matter is resolved. When unpaid rent, mortgage repayments, insurance and maintenance are added, a small investor may be carrying the property for well over a year before possession is recovered.
Dispute resolution partner Elaine Elder says the burden is not confined to large portfolios. Many of the firm’s clients have one or two properties tied to retirement or long-term financial plans and, after absorbing months of arrears and costs, “decide they have no option but to sell”.
What the queue looks like on the ground
One case published by the firm involved a couple who bought a two-bedroom Glasgow flat as a retirement investment.
They continued paying the mortgage, insurance and maintenance without rental income while pursuing possession through Scotland’s First-tier Tribunal. Their tenant had been allocated alternative council accommodation but did not leave and later failed to attend the hearing.
The couple described the process as “extremely frustrating” and said its complexity and technical requirements made an already difficult situation worse.
That distinction matters: an eight-to-12-month wait to a hearing is not necessarily the full period before the landlord has the property back. Notice periods, pre-action requirements, adjournments, a decision, any appeal period and enforcement can extend the end-to-end timeline further.
How did it get this bad?
Scotland introduced the private residential tenancy on 1 December 2017. Almost all new private tenancies became open-ended, and a landlord could recover possession only by establishing at least one of 18 statutory eviction grounds. Private rented sector cases also moved from the Sheriff Court to the First-tier Tribunal.
The Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Act 2022 then made formerly mandatory eviction grounds discretionary on a permanent basis and put pre-action requirements for rent-arrears cases on a permanent footing.
The tribunal’s workload has grown. Its 2023–24 annual report recorded 5,078 applications – 10 per cent more than the previous year and the highest annual volume to that point, according to the Parliament’s briefing. Industry bodies argue that capacity has not kept pace.
Petition PE2180 said the absence of prescribed case-progress and hearing timelines was causing applicants anxiety, financial hardship and ill health.
Its claim that most applicants own only one rental property was not itself an official tribunal finding, although Scottish Government registration data from August 2025 showed 71 per cent of registrations were for landlords recorded with one property.
The Government cautions that the data include duplicate registrations and joint owners.
The Scottish Government did formally respond to the petition in October 2025. In its written submission, it said tribunal administration was independent, but that officials were working with the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service on caseload, staffing and costs. Additional legal members had been appointed in August 2025, with further recruitment priorities under review.
The Government rejected statutory case deadlines as impractical, arguing that speed must be balanced with proper consideration of each matter. The petition was closed in November 2025.
So the accurate criticism is not that nothing has been done. It is that, despite additional appointments and ongoing work, landlords and their advisers say cases are still taking eight to 12 months to reach a hearing.
Are landlords really leaving?
The supply argument needs care.
SAL and Aberdein Considine say delays are damaging confidence and contributing to some landlords’ decisions to sell. But neither their client reports nor registration counts establish that tribunal delays have caused a net fall in rental supply.
The Scottish Landlord Register’s latest data release shows why. The number of registered landlords has fallen over recent years while the number of registered properties has edged up – a pattern consistent with consolidation into larger portfolios, but not proof of it.
The register is also an administrative system rather than a live measure of available rental stock. Registrations last three years and exits can appear with a lag, limitations acknowledged in Scottish Government statistics. Landlord totals can also include duplicate registrations and joint owners.
The defensible conclusion is narrower: long tribunal delays increase the cost and risk of providing a rental property, and industry participants say that pressure is influencing some owners’ decisions. The size of any resulting loss of rental supply is not yet established.
How Australia’s tribunals compare
The mechanics should look familiar. Every Australian state and territory routes possession matters through a tribunal or court, and several jurisdictions have restricted or abolished no-grounds evictions.
On published benchmarks, Australia is still faster than Scotland – but the headline numbers can conceal the matters that take longest.
A Law and Justice Foundation analysis of 39,707 NSW tenancy applications finalised in 2024 found a 21-day median for Residential Tenancy List applications.
That figure did not mean every dispute was substantively resolved in 21 days: NCAT’s administrative data can record procedural orders as final orders, and one dispute can generate multiple applications.
The 10 per cent of cases that progressed to a recorded contested hearing took a median of 101 days. The report’s data also predate NSW’s May 2025 rental reforms.
In Victoria, VCAT currently says the average residential tenancy application takes about eight weeks to reach a hearing. Possession applications for unpaid rent are heard in about five weeks, most other possession applications within 12 weeks, and a residential tenancy case takes about five weeks to finalise.
Those are estimates, not guarantees, and VCAT says individual matters may take more or less time.
Victoria has already shown how quickly a tribunal queue can deteriorate – and how a funded recovery can change it. VCAT’s residential tenancy bond and compensation backlog peaked at 24,000 cases before a refreshed recovery program began in October 2023. Median waits reached 42 weeks in July 2023.
After new members, more registry staff and operational changes, VCAT reported the backlog cleared by November 2024 and the median wait back to six weeks.
Queensland is the other jurisdiction to watch. QCAT’s figures as at 16 March 2026 show three-quarters of urgent residential tenancy disputes finalised within eight weeks and non-urgent disputes within 28 weeks. One quarter took longer, sometimes considerably longer.
Many termination, abandoned-premises and possession applications are classified as urgent. The non-urgent list is broader than bond and compensation disputes: it also includes general disputes, serious-breach terminations, routine repairs and other matters.
South Australia’s current SACAT guidance does not publish an equivalent fixed benchmark, while Western Australia and Tasmania route residential tenancy disputes through their Magistrates Courts.
Comparisons across jurisdictions therefore need to distinguish an application from a case, a first listing from a final decision, and a final order from actual recovery of possession.
What the official timeframes miss
Kirk Stafford, a respected industry figure, told Elite Agent that Victorian property managers do not experience one dependable possession timeframe.
“It’s really a case of ‘hurry up and wait’ once you make the application,” he said.
Stafford said his recent view was necessarily anecdotal, but that he had heard of hearings being adjourned on the day because no member was available. He advises owners to prepare for a process of at least three months where a tenancy is contested or otherwise difficult.
He also sees tension in outcomes: payment plans may be approved where agents doubt the renter can meet them, while VCAT’s requirement to consider whether possession is reasonable and proportionate can make results difficult for owners to predict.
Stafford makes the tenant-side point too. Some renters are genuinely struggling and deserve patience, he said, but the people providing the properties also need a process they can navigate with confidence.
One Melbourne landlord’s case shows how far an individual matter can depart from the benchmark. Daniel Yeats went through 13 VCAT hearings after the renters in his South Morang property stopped paying in May 2025.
He regained possession in January 2026 – about eight months later – and estimated his losses from unpaid rent, legal fees and repairs at more than $65,000. He took FIFO work to keep covering the mortgage.
The case is one account, not a measure of typical VCAT performance, but it shows why a median or average cannot describe the risk at the tail of the queue.
“This matter won’t be heard today”: the view from inside an agency
Linda Gulabovska is a senior property manager and department leader at Right Choice Real Estate in Warilla, on the NSW South Coast. She says the state’s headline tribunal speed does not reflect what her team is seeing in contested matters since the rental reforms commenced in May 2025.
“As every termination now requires a prescribed legislative ground, there appears to be greater scope for applications to be challenged, resulting in more matters proceeding beyond the initial hearing,” she told Elite Agent.
Gulabovska said members sometimes flag at the outset that a matter will not be decided that day, with comments to the effect of: “This matter won’t be heard today. I only have 10 minutes.”
The first listing can then become a conciliation or procedural event, with the substantive dispute pushed into a formal hearing queue.
Her agency records show the consequences.
In one matter, a bond dispute lodged in October 2024 waited roughly nine months for a formal hearing date. The parties settled outside the tribunal before it was heard.
In another, a first home buyer seeking vacant possession so they could move into their property was refused an urgent hearing.
In the agency’s most serious current file, a property had been vacant since 15 May 2026 and appeared abandoned, but the tenant would not acknowledge that it had been vacated. The application was lodged on 25 May and first listed on 10 June. A request for an urgent hearing on financial-hardship grounds was refused on 8 July, and the matter still had no formal hearing date at the time of writing.
The agency calculated the owner’s losses at $17,171, comprising $2,351 in rent arrears, a $1,640 break-lease fee, $5,800 in cleaning and damage, and $7,380 in lost rent over nine weeks. The property had been appraised for sale.
“Matters that would previously have been resolved within weeks are now remaining open for many months,” Gulabovska said.
The delay also lands on agency teams. Property managers must reconstruct old files when a hearing date finally arrives, and staff can inherit cases from colleagues who have moved on.
Across the previous 12 months, Gulabovska said her agency’s investor clients had sold 83 rental properties and another 34 owners had moved back into their investments. She described tribunal delays as a recurring concern in those conversations, not the sole reason for every decision.
That is one agency’s experience, not statewide supply data. But it is the sort of operational warning that published tribunal averages can miss.
The lesson for Australian agencies
Scotland’s warning is not simply that tenancy protections create delay. It is what happens when more complex decision-making meets a tribunal without enough practical capacity to move contested files.
Victoria’s recovery program demonstrates that backlogs are not inevitable. Members, registry staff, scheduling and case preparation can materially reduce a queue. Scotland demonstrates the cost when wait times remain elevated even after the problem is recognised.
For property managers and principals, arrears management is no longer just an administrative task.
When each week in the queue adds to an owner’s exposure, the agency’s most visible value lies in acting quickly, lodging a clean file, documenting every step and setting honest expectations about the difference between a first listing and a final outcome.
No agency can control a tribunal’s capacity. It can control how long it takes to reach the queue and how well the matter is prepared when it is finally called.
Sidebar: Control the controllables
You cannot shorten the tribunal’s queue, but you can make sure the file joins it as early, as cleanly and in the right category as possible.
1. Act when the trigger date arrives. The tribunal clock starts when the application is lodged. Know the relevant notice and application requirements in your jurisdiction, and build workflows around the legal trigger dates.
2. Make the paperwork watertight. Service errors, wrong dates and incorrect forms can cause rejection, adjournment or refiling. Treat every notice and evidence bundle as if it will be tested at a contested hearing.
3. Check the insurance before you need it. At onboarding, confirm whether the owner’s landlord insurance covers rent default and what the policy requires. Notification deadlines and claims conditions vary, so check the relevant product disclosure statement and notify the insurer promptly.
4. Know the urgent pathway. Understand what qualifies for priority or urgent treatment in your jurisdiction and what evidence the tribunal expects. An urgent application is not guaranteed to be accepted simply because the owner is losing money.
5. Communicate while the matter is waiting. Set update intervals even when nothing has changed. Regular, accurate contact cannot fix the delay, but it can preserve an owner’s confidence in how the agency is managing it.