Big argument over a tiny house: Stand-off leaves couple homeless
A dramatic dawn visit with an angle grinder was the latest step in an angry dispute between a couple and their landlord over their tiny house, writes Steve Kilgallon.
Living off the grid, off the land, in a tiny house deep in the bush: it was Quinn Gilmour’s dream. It was what convinced her to move to New Zealand.
And when rental houses became increasingly difficult to find because of her friendly, but big, rescue dog Lukas, she was sure she was making the right decision.
Three years ago, Gilmour, from Canada, and her English partner Richard Edwards took the plunge and paid $100,000 for a tiny house – just 28 square metres – which they decorated themselves, including a bright rainbow pattern on the outside.
At first, they shared a site in Whenuapai, West Auckland, but after some tensions with their neighbours, Gilmour turned to a Facebook group called Tiny House Landsharing to find a new location for her house - and that’s where she made contact with a man named Addam Buttling.
Buttling had been advertising sites “purpose built for tiny homes, on a 15-acre block”, all with power, water, and greywater collection and told her of his rural, bushlined section in nearby Swanson. It sounded perfect - and was close to most of the customers of Gilmour’s fledgling gardening business.
But once the couple moved their home on to Buttling’s property in December 2023, things turned bad. Almost immediately. It’s led to a bitter dispute between landlord and tenant - and left Gilmour and Edwards homeless, because Buttling has refused to let them take their tiny house off his land.
The first surprise, claims Gilmour, came shortly after they had moved their house into a corner of Buttling’s steep block just outside Swanson village.
Their new landlord told them, they say, there would be no formal tenancy agreement, and the bond would be three months’ rent ($4350), not the two they had anticipated - leading Gilmour to offer a $2000 water tank as part-payment of the bond. (Buttling says he’s never used the tank because it was supplied without key components - and he says the money was not a bond, but a security deposit against any potential damage caused by moving the house, and the ‘rent’ was actually storage fees.)
The bond, they were told, wouldn’t be returned, but instead, when they wanted to leave, they could serve a 90-day notice and stop paying rent (this bond wasn’t lodged, but the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment says that tiny houses are carved out of the Residential Tenancies Act, so it shouldn’t be). Buttling, of course, says the money wasn’t a bond, but a security deposit.
Having spent $3600 to truck their home to the site, money was tight, and the couple felt they had to stick it out, but Gilmour says the relationship with their new landlord was always a difficult one.
They claim issues over the greywater connection and fencing of the site - and both her and Buttling agree there was an angry confrontation between them, in which both claim the other lost their temper.
Buttling also told the couple, they claim, that when the council visited, they would have to make the house look as if it was unoccupied, including disconnecting their utilities and tacking a sheet over the front door.
But none of this is true, says Buttling. “It’s really simple,” he says. “You guys are looking for a villain.”
The deal, he says, was only ever for the house to be kept on his land in storage. It was clear to him the house (which doesn’t have building consent) was non-compliant and not entirely self-contained. “It was storage, and Richard knew that.. They always knew the deal.
“Don’t use their argument to make a villain. I was simply offering them somewhere to store their building ... and I’m allowed to store buildings on my property.”
While he had advertised tiny house sites, Buttling didn’t have resource consent for occupied tiny houses on his property. The
Sunday Star-Times has seen an email from a council officer saying they’d been assured by Buttling that nobody would live in the tiny houses. He, in turn, says his land is purely a storage yard.
Auckland Council compliance manager Adrian Wilson confirms that because the property is rurally zoned, an occupied tiny house would need resource consent, and a building consent if it was connected to utilities. He said inspections in February and June found the three tiny houses on site were unoccupied; they’ve now opened “another investigation regarding people living in unconsented dwellings at this property”.
The couple say they complied with demands to make the house look unoccupied on that first council visit, but relations had soured enough by the second time council came that Gilmour refused to comply.
She supplied the Sunday Star-Times with a video recording she says is from the day of that second visit. In the recording, Buttling approaches the window of her house and says: “Is the gas disconnected?” She says it isn’t, and Buttling replies: “Well they’ll be here in about 10 minutes.” Gilmour then threatens to call police if he disconnects it.
Buttling says the video is actually the result of a previous conversation where he’d already told the couple they shouldn’t be living there, and he was querying why they had connected up the gas, “because she knows they aren’t meant to be in there”.
By that stage, Gilmour and Edwards found a new place to move their tiny house to, in the north Auckland village of Waiwera.
A day after that recording, they served notice they wanted to leave. On legal advice, they offered 30 days’ warning instead of the agreed 90, and halted rent payments, so they would get at least some of their bond back. Buttling says that notice was to try to “fabricate” a tenancy which never existed.
Three days later, says Gilmour, they got a message telling them to leave the site or be trespassed.
They arranged friends to help them take some possessions, including a generator and solar panels, away; then at 3pm, received another message telling them to be offsite by 6pm, but that they could have three hours on the following Monday to remove everything else. Buttling says that was a reasonable amount of time for them to remove their personal effects off his land when they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
On the Monday morning, the couple returned with a truck and police to take the house away, but found the gate locked and Buttling refusing to open it. Gilmour says police told her she would have to leave.
They made a second attempt to retrieve their house in July, using an angle grinder to cut the gate lock (Gilmour says one police officer advised her she was within her rights to do so; Buttling says it was criminal damage and trespass) only to find this time a digger parked across the access to their home.
Police came to mediate. Buttling wasn’t present, but his partner, Charmaine Oosthoek, told Edwards the couple hadn’t paid “their storage fees”. Gilmour says there was also a claim the ground was too soft to safely remove the house.
She says she offered to drop any legal claim if Buttling agreed for the digger to be moved, and he declined. Gilmour alleges Oosthoek then removed wires from the digger to render it inoperational. Police, she says, then told her she would be charged if the digger was moved, and they had to leave. They walked out with what possessions they could carry.
Will they make another attempt to retrieve the home? “I don’t know if it will go any differently,” she says.
Gilmour says now she should have seen warning signs when in their first conversation, she claims, Buttling told her he had refused to allow some previous tenants to take away their tiny house, which was still on site, because they hadn’t paid for damage they had caused to his driveways.
“At the time, I thought fair enough if they did a bunch of damage and didn’t pay for it, I guess. Now I am thinking what a piece of s .... ”
Addam Buttling is no stranger to property disputes.
“Every time you guys have had a f... ing opportunity to talk to me, you don’t ever quote anything I say, so what’s the point of having a conversation now,” he says when he first talks to the Sunday Star-Times.
“I think he thought we were going to be so stupid: ‘here’s this hippy chick who’s into the environment and we can just screw them’. And he has.”
Quinn Gilmour
“There’s always two sides to every story.”
He feels burned by a New Zealand Herald story from 2018 and another from The
Post in 2023 detailing those disputes, or, as he describes it, “that bollocks in Wellington and that bollocks in Waiwera”.
John McGettigan would disagree. “I’m pleased you are again going to expose [Buttling],” he says. “I had hoped we had stopped him back in 2018.”
According to reporting at the time, McGettigan agreed to sell his Whangaparāoa home to the Addams Trust Company - sole shareholder, Buttling - for $2.5 million in 2015. Buttling was allowed immediate occupancy for $1000 a week rent, a 5% deposit, and settlement 13 months later. McGettigan had to warrant that upon settlement all building work was compliant, consented and a code compliance certificate issued. A final inspection was done and McGettigan just had to file documents to get the certificate.
Buttling paid a year’s rent upfront, but paid his deposit seven months late, didn’t complete the sale and stayed on without paying rent for six months before asking for first a $500,000 then a $1.344m price cut, claiming more work was needed. When McGettigan went to file paperwork, he’d found a reinspection of the property ordered without his consent. He tried several times to access the property but was blocked.
The High Court found Buttling had “no arguable defence” and gave him a week to leave, saying it had caused McGettigan “considerable hardship and distress”.
He said it took another six months to evict Buttling – by force – leading to criminal charges against him that were later dropped. He says Buttling was ordered to pay him $100,000 that was never paid, and he came close to bankruptcy. So upset, he wrote a book about his experience - but his lawyer advised him not to make it public. McGettigan describes Buttling as “incredibly clever and deviant”.
He says he fears Gilmour and Edwards have a “very long road ahead”.
Buttling was back in the media last year over a dispute over his purchase of a Wellington property occupied by an artists collective called Nautilus. The Nautilus Group claimed Buttling had initially given them permission to stay on temporarily, then revoked it. Buttling didn’t meet the first or second settlement dates, owner Mike Gall told The Post last year. “[He’s been] mucking me around,” he said, adding the settlement had been slow and complex. Gall didn’t return the Sunday Star-Times’ calls, but a company co-owned by Buttling is now recorded as the legal owner of the property and Buttling says the story was a non-event manufactured by disgruntled tenants.
There does seem a long road ahead for Gilmour and Edwards.
Both council and police say they consider the dispute a civil matter.
Police refused an interview, and provided a statement which they refused, despite several requests, to attribute to anyone beyond a nameless ‘spokesperson’. It said they’d “received several reports relating to this ongoing dispute in Swanson. We have spoken to all parties involved, but taking the circumstances into account ultimately this is a civil matter. As such, the next appropriate step for the complainant is to obtain a court order to recover their property.”
When the Sunday Star-Times visited the property, there were multiple shipping containers on site, as well as what appeared to be the dismantled parts of an adventure playground, two unoccupied tiny homes, and Gilmour and Edwards’ home, with the digger still parked in front.
Gilmour claims one container is being lived in; while the Sunday Star-Times was there a man – not Buttling – left the property at about 8am from a car parked in front of one of those containers. Buttling says the man was an employee collecting work materials and nobody lives there. He wasn’t there; Oosthoek answered the door and said he was in Wellington, uncontactable and demanded we leave.
Buttling says he’d happily resolve the dispute – but through lawyers, because he finds Gilmour difficult to deal with.
His terms, he considers, are straightforward: he wants three months’ notice, he wants the move to happen in dry weather so the ground isn’t damaged, and he wants an insurance guarantee the couple will pay for any remediation that is required, by what he says would be about 50 tonnes of trucking equipment.
“Everything I am saying to you is not unreasonable, but they are being unreasonable in their approach,” he says. “They are trying to use you guys to create leverage. I’m not going to bend and fold to that... What’s happened is really avoidable. But if someone puts me in a corner...”
Gilmour, meanwhile, says she’s tried, unsuccessfully, to find a lawyer willing to take a court case pro bono. The couple have lost their deposit on the new tiny house site and instead have signed a one-year contract on a rental property in Birkdale: they think the battle to get their home back could take that long. But they aren’t giving up.
“I think he thought we were going to be so stupid: ‘here’s this hippy chick who’s into the environment and we can just screw them’,” she says. “And he has. But I want to make it very difficult for him to do it to someone else.”