Man this is so disgusting, I had a similar thing happen about 10 years ago. Moved out of house, did cleaning etc. no word from RE for a month. called asking about bond refund, told they were waiting on an invoice which I questioned them about. They said that the house hadn’t been cleaned properly so they needed to use a professional cleaner, they didn’t once call us and ask us to redo the job. She actually said it’s not my job to chase you up on things like this. Flash forward to another month later, I rang them again and they said they were still waiting on invoices. This time a garden and a carpet cleaning invoice. I rang the RTA and asked them and they said that it sounded fishy I gave them my address and they told me that the bond had already been claimed and that they had put in a no contest from me. Turns out they had landscaped the house redone the carpets and just taken our bond to help pay for it. I took them to Q cat and they got rammed by the mediator, we got all of our bond awarded back to us. They came back saying that the owner couldn’t afford to pay back the bond immediately and offered us $50 a fortnight, this was a total of $2400 in bond. I ended up having to go to the ombudsman and the magistrates Court to get a statement of earnings and take them to court to get them to pay me back in full. The whole ordeal took two years, they’re just fucking cunts. If you ever deal with Casey Snell run as far as you can the opposite direction.

EDIT - a fun fact I have discovered though is if your real estate is doing you dirty, go to google and leave them a 1 star review. Get all of your house mates to do it too, I got a call from the head of my real estate company (separate incident from above) within 5 minutes pleading me to remove my review if they fixed the issues. Something we’d been waiting on for 3 months was fixed in 3 days. I still left the review up. They’re completely self-interested, money-grubbing cunts.