1. Could you tell me a little about your company?  Thanks!

BuyMyRent Inc. is an innovative, and up and coming company that offers unique services to small business landlords, allowing them to recover 100% of their lost revenues from unpaid rent. We are the first and the only company in Canada to offer this service.

By way of a small annual fee, landlords are guaranteed that they will be financially compensated for a portion of their lost rental income if tenants do not to pay their rent. Our solution provides a level of financial certainty and security to the landlord’s property management business.

2.    As a small business landlord in Ontario your company sounds too good to be true.    Could you explain how your program works?  I’m very interested.

Many people have the same reaction as you, but actually our company is based on a very simple business model. For a small yearly fee, landlords will be able to sell us their tribunal or other court order that they have been awarded when the tenant defaults on their rent. That’s the basic plan which can be as low as 35 % of one month’s rent per year and will ensure we buy up to 3 months worth of lost rent. The premium plan costs starts at 50% of one month’s rent and in addition to paying out the value of rent, BuyMyRent will pay for damages, utilities, legal fees, or any other losses in the court order, for a total value of up to 4 months of rent. We have made it so simple to use that many of our landlords have had the same reaction as you. Rest assured, our services are true and they are that good.

We have worked very hard to make our services as easy to understand and as simple to use as possible.

Here is the further break down of how it works:

• The first step is to create a free user account on BuyMyRent.ca. This account is used to manage your various plans.
• Once your account is created, simply select one of our plans. One plan is attached to one unit based on your needs. The price of the plan depends on how much you want BuyMyRent to purchase if you need to sell an order. For most of our landlords, they base their purchase value on the value of 1 month‘s rent, but you can enter whatever amount you are comfortable with so long as it does not exceed the equivalent of 1 month’s rent for that unit.
• Once the plan is selected, simply complete the online form and pay the plan amount. If ever you have a tenant that does not pay their rent, get a court order against them.
• Once the order is received simply log back into your account and submit a sell request. The sell request transfers your unpaid rent debt to us which we compensate you dollar for dollar up to the maximum of your plan value. All is done via your online account and takes only minutes to complete. The documents required to submit a sell request are:

o   Copy of the Lease Agreement between the landlord and the tenant in question;

o   Proof of ownership for the property;

o   Copy of the Order form the tribunal or court; and

o   Any other information required by BuyMyRent as a show of proof to satisfy the above criteria.

• BuyMyRent will process your request and send you a check for the amount of the sell request within days of you submitting it to us. You can make as many purchase requests as required up to your plan’s maximum purchase amount.

3.    I’m excited about your company’s services.  How did you come up with this idea and how did you get a team together and form this idea?

A few years ago, I was having an unfortunate string of bad luck with tenants. It seemed to me that each new tenant was worse than the previous one. I started looking at what I was maybe doing wrong and the sources of information I was relying on to decide who to rent to. After a few months of analyzing my screening procedure, I realized that no matter what sources of information I used, nothing could provide me with the reassurance that the tenant that I was going to select was going to pay their rent. During my analysis/research, I came across a couple of European insurance companies that provided landlords with rent insurance.  Unfortunately, these services were not available in Canada. For the most part, the reason why this type of insurance is not available within Canada is due to our laws, the way tenant information is tracked, the lack of statistical information and how our legal system tends to favour the tenant over the landlord. Since insurance companies are normally risk averse, they do not find that the Canadian rental market would be a good target for these types of services.

As a result of the above analysis and information, my partner and I decided to see if there was something we could do to introduce this type of service within Canada. We spent the next year and half going through mountains of statistical information from hundreds of sources. We even identified information from CMHC, which they themselves did not know they had. After putting this information together, we realized that there was a potential for this type of service if the right ingredients came together. Now, one thing we knew when we started this is that we needed someone who knew the legal system. Mr. Beaudoin and I, therefore, approached Mr. Kim von Arx a gentlemen which I had the opportunity to work with on another start-up. We explained what we wanted to do and how we wanted to provide the service. Mr. von Arx, being an entrepreneur at heart, was easily convinced and agreed to join our partnership.