Blinds for Albury rental properties.

The border catch: NSW and Victoria are not the same.

This is the one that surprises Albury-Wodonga investors who own on both sides of the river. In NSW, the Residential Tenancies Act 2010 requires premises to be fit for habitation, and the minimum standards deal with lighting, ventilation, plumbing and bathroom privacy. They do not explicitly mandate window coverings. In Victoria, the rental minimum standards do exactly that: any room likely to be used as a bedroom or a living room must have window coverings capable of providing privacy. So the same investor with a house in Lavington and a unit in Wodonga has a hard obligation on one and a fitness-for-habitation judgement on the other. In practice both get blinds, because the condition report and the lease will be read against you either way.

Cord safety is your obligation, not the tenant's.

When you supply a corded internal window covering you are the supplier for the purposes of the Competition and Consumer (Corded Internal Window Coverings) Safety Standard 2014. That means no loop within a child's reach, a tensioner or cleat mechanically fixed to the wall or architrave, and the warning label present. It is not enough that it was compliant on the day it went in. If a handyman replaced a chain between tenancies and left it hanging loose, that blind now fails. The gap between corded and cordless on a rental-grade roller is small enough that we recommend cordless across the board on any property likely to house a family. The detail is on blind cord safety in Albury.

Spec it for the tenancy, not for the photos.

The instinct is to fit what you would want at home. Resist it. A rental blind is judged on how it looks at the end of the fourth tenancy, not the first inspection. Blockout roller blinds in a mid-grade fabric are the workhorse: cheap, universally understood, and built from parts you can swap. Roman blinds and long curtains look beautiful and then collect cooking grease, pet damage and end-of-lease cleaning disputes. Sheers get burn holes and snags. If you want one hero product, put plantation shutters on the front windows only, where they lift the street appeal and cannot be damaged by anything short of deliberate force.

What the fit-out actually costs in 2026.

A typical three-bedroom brick-veneer rental around Lavington, Glenroy or West Albury has about nine windows. Done in blockout rollers to the bedrooms, light-filter through the living areas and a simple roller in each wet room, that is roughly $1,300 to $2,400 supplied and installed. A two-bedroom unit with five or six windows lands around $850 to $1,600. Compare that to the $2,400 to $4,500 an owner-occupier typically spends on the same nine-window house and you can see where the money goes: fabric grade, operation type and whether anything is motorised. The full ranges are on our Albury cost guide.

Worked example: a Thurgoona investment townhouse.

Three bedrooms, open-plan living, seven windows, currently fitted with the builder's cheap standard-width blinds that were trimmed on site and now hang crooked. Re-doing the lot in made-to-measure cordless blockout rollers comes to about $1,050 to $1,900. Two of those windows face west across the Thurgoona estate with nothing to shade them, so we would put a mid-grade blockout with a reflective backing on those two rather than the base fabric, adding maybe $60 to $120 total. That small upgrade is the difference between fabric that survives eight summers and fabric that goes brittle in four.

The maintenance maths landlords miss.

Cheap online blinds look like a saving until you price the callouts. They come in standard widths and get cut down, so they sit out of square in an opening, the brackets work loose, and your property manager logs a maintenance request every time a tenant tugs one. Each of those is a service call at $90 to $180 before any parts. Made-to-measure blinds fitted square to the opening simply do not generate that stream of small jobs, and when a clutch does eventually fail, it is a $60 to $140 part rather than a new blind. Over a ten-year hold the made-to-measure option is usually the cheaper one, which is not the answer people expect.

Tax treatment, briefly and carefully.

Blinds and curtains are generally treated as depreciating assets rather than capital works, and the ATO publishes effective lives, commonly cited as six years for curtains and ten years for internal blinds. Fixed plantation shutters often get treated as capital works instead, because they behave as a fixture rather than plant. There is also the 2017 change that limits deductions for second-hand plant in residential rentals. Which bucket your job falls into changes the return meaningfully, so take the invoice to your accountant and get it confirmed. We fit blinds, we do not give tax advice, and you should be suspicious of any installer who does.

Frequently asked questions.