00:00A backyard to play in for Shadow and Hope, after their owner, Janita Milne, battled with
00:08housing instability for years.
00:10My two dogs are my world, they're my babies.
00:14Changes to South Australian laws last year mean landlords or agents can't ban pets, unless
00:20it's prohibited in strata or community title rules.
00:24Janita thinks it helped a bit, but it was still tough to find an affordable place to
00:28have her dogs.
00:29It made probably a small percentage of a difference.
00:34It's definitely making it a little bit easier.
00:39Rental advocates say while it's brought some relief for renters, the changes have only
00:43made a small difference in practice.
00:46Because landlords can still refuse an application for any given reason, there is still concern
00:52that those applications are being refused because people have pets.
00:56In shelters where capacity is limited due to increasing surrender numbers, cost of living
01:01pressures and rental challenges continue to bite.
01:03There's been a nearly 2.5% increase in people needing to surrender their dogs in that time,
01:08so year on year since that legislation was brought in.
01:11The legislative reforms were among a suite of changes which also ended no-cause evictions
01:16and increased the notice for ending a fixed tenancy from 28 days to 60 days.
01:21Minister Andrea Michaels says so far they've received positive feedback on the changes.
01:26We really haven't seen many complaints from either tenants or landlords and when we introduced
01:31this we did think there might be some backlash, but I think we did strike the right balance.
01:37For Janita, she hopes these legislative changes are just the start.
