When Lara Dunkley first noticed mould creeping down the walls of her Darwin home, she never imagined she would be effectively homeless within six months.

Ms Dunkley is no stranger to the Top End humidity, so when she found the mould she cleaned it, told the real estate agent and vowed to use the air-conditioner more.

But when she later discovered there was a leak coming from the apartment above, she had to get the landlord involved.

"Every day I would get home and go 'what's going to be mouldy now?'," she said.

"I'd throw out a pair of shoes today, a handbag tomorrow … spend hours scrubbing mould off the walls.

After months of waiting, Ms Dunkley and her housemate moved into a hotel for nine days while the leak was fixed, only to be told when it was time to move back in that their lease was not being renewed.

The pair were given two weeks to leave.

"It was just devastating … we put six months of our lives into trying to maintain this property for our landlord, just to be kicked out with so little notice," Ms Dunkley said.

"They said that they wanted to sell the property [and] we did have somebody come in to do an appraisal but we then saw it advertised again a couple of months later.

"It felt like by the end of it the estate agents just felt like I was a troublemaker."

'Gossip' not regulated

The Northern Territory has the highest percentage of renters in the country, with almost half the population reliant on someone else to keep a roof over their head.

Matthew Barsden is a tenancy solicitor with the Darwin Community Legal Service (DCLS).

He said a recent survey of 200 of DCLS's clients showed Ms Dunkley's experience was not unusual, with a lack of responsiveness from agents and an inability to secure repairs two major themes in the results.

"Quite frequently landlords will take weeks and weeks and weeks to make repairs, sometimes months, sometimes not at all," he said.

"They're choosing not to go ahead with seeking any compensation in more than about half of the cases simply because the reports generally say that they're worried about any sort of negative consequences for themselves.

"One of those negative consequences might be that because they've sought compensation that they'll be seen as somebody who's difficult to deal with and they might not be able to get another tenancy later on because even though blacklists are regulated, gossip is not."

Mr Barsden said while other jurisdictions in Australia have laws against "no-fault evictions", in the NT, landlords can simply "give notice without reason".

Cost of living hitting renters hardest

For Ms Dunkley and her housemate, the eviction left them scrambling to find somewhere to live and her pleas to the landlord to let them stay while they found a buyer fell on deaf ears.

After several months couch surfing, a series of family tragedies meant Ms Dunkley was finally able to scrape together a deposit to buy a property but she still worries about "how everybody else is going to survive".

"Five loved ones had to die [to provide an inheritance] and I don't see any way it could have happened otherwise," she said.

Mr Barsden said cost of living has been biting hard for his clients over the past 12 months.

He said while interest rate pressures are squeezing home owners' budgets, there is a key difference when it comes to those renting.

"If you're in mortgage stress you can go to your bank and you can apply for a hardship program, all of them have them and they have to offer it to you," he said.

"No such hardship provisions apply for tenants, if a tenant is in financial stress and they can't make a full rent payment and they eventually fall into 14 days' arrears, then they're going to be out of that tenancy very quickly.

"It's very frequent and it's one of the bigger areas of law that we see, these terminations for rental arrears."

Mr Barsden said he would like to see a ban on no-fault evictions, as well as minium standards for rental housing and "a more uniform approach to rental increases", with the NT the last place in Australia with a six-month, rather than 12-month, cycle.

He says "the vast majority" of NT renters are now spending more than the benchmark one-third of their income on rent, with many paying up to 60 per cent.

A spokeswoman for NT Housing Minister Steve Edgington said the government was "focused on restoring our territory lifestyle which includes reducing anti-social behaviour at public housing".

"We will consider tenancy reform in due course as we look at our wider policy settings," she said.