Preparing your evidence for an RTB hearing.

Most people prepare for a hearing by rehearsing what they will say. The better-prepared party works the other way around: they gather the documents first, and let the documents decide what needs saying. The decision-maker will not take your word for anything they can be shown instead — and well-prepared evidence does much of your talking before you open your mouth. This guide covers the method.

1. Start with the chronology

Before gathering a single document, write the chronology: every significant date in the dispute, one line each, in order — tenancy start, payments, notices, requests, inspections, correspondence. The chronology does three jobs at once. It tells you which documents you need (every line should have one behind it). It exposes the gaps in your own case before the other side does. And at the hearing it becomes your spine: a decision-maker who can follow your dates can follow your case.

2. Every assertion needs a document

Go through your chronology line by line and ask: what proves this? Rent paid — bank statements, with the relevant lines marked. Condition — dated photographs, ingoing report, inventory. Communications — the messages and letters themselves, not your memory of them. Money claimed — the statement of account, and invoices for work actually done. A line with no document behind it is a line you will be asserting on credibility alone; know in advance which lines those are, because the other side will find them.

3. You do not need to build a professional bundle

Here is the part the anxious lay party can relax about: you are not expected to produce an indexed, page-numbered brief. The RTB does the assembling — the evidence each side submits is compiled into the case file, paginated by the RTB itself, and issued to the parties and the decision-maker before the hearing. In an ideal world tidy numbering never hurts, but it is not necessary and nobody will hold its absence against you.

What is yours to do is make each document usable: submit documents whole, not extracts — a fragment invites the question of what the rest says; keep screenshots uncropped, with the sender, date and thread visible; date and label photographs with what they show and where; and redact confidential details — bank account numbers, phone numbers, third parties' information — before submitting, because that responsibility stays with you.

4. Lodge it in advance — by the deadline you were given

Your RTB case-file letter sets out how and when to submit your documents. Treat that deadline as immovable: evidence lodged in advance is evidence the decision-maker has read; evidence produced on the day starts life at a disadvantage, and may have difficulty being considered at all. Lodging in advance also disciplines you — it forces the gathering to be finished early, which is exactly when you want to discover what is missing. At the hearing, have the case file you were issued to hand, and know your way around it: the strongest answers end at a page of it.

5. Include what hurts

The strongest evidence sets are not one-sided. If a document is unhelpful but plainly relevant, the choice is between the decision-maker seeing it with your explanation, or seeing it in the other side's submissions with theirs. A party who visibly plays fair earns credibility on every contested point — and credibility is the currency the unprovable lines of your chronology are spent in.

The practical point

A hearing rewards the party who did the boring work: gathered, dated, labelled, lodged on time. It is not glamorous, and it is the closest thing to an advantage the process offers either side for free.