Posts Tagged ‘landlord advocacy’

The Toronto Sun: Ontario Rent Hike Lowest in 35 Years

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

Ontario’s rent hike lowest in 35 years

By ANTONELLA ARTUSO, Queen’s Park Bureau Chief
Last Updated: January 2, 2011 5:20pm

Ontario rents will be allowed to edge up by only 0.7% in 2011.

It is the lowest increase in the 35-year history of the province’s rent guideline — the maximum annual rent increase allowable without seeking special approval from the Landlord and Tenant Board for a heftier hike.

“The McGuinty government is providing real protection for tenants by linking the rent increase guideline to the Ontario Consumer Price Index which prevents routine rent increases above the rate of inflation while ensuring landlords can recover increases in their costs,” said Liberal cabinet minister Jim Bradley.

Stuart Henderson, a moderator with the Ontario Landlords Association, which typically represents property owners with less than five units for rent, said the tiny increase has many of the group’s members wondering if they can afford to stay in the business.

“We’re the ones that are paying all these new costs — the price of gas, hydro, the HST — and then we kind of get kicked in the stomach with a 0.7% increase,” he said. “It leaves kind of the worst landlords in the market, people who are renting out fire traps, illegal places.”

The next provincial election will be held in October, and Henderson said the McGuinty government is clearly currying favour with tenants.

“It’s political opportunism,” he charged. “We feel that the McGuinty government is trying to protect against a backlash from tenants in Toronto.”

Geordie Dent, executive director of the Federation of Metro Tenants’ Associations, said landlords may be complaining now but they weren’t protesting when the province allowed yearly increases in the range of 5% in the 1990s.

The recession has been very hard on many tenants, and unemployment in Toronto continues to hover at about 10%, he said.

”It’s not renting out a movie at Blockbusters — it’s people’s housing,” Dent said. “Any increase right now during this difficult time is hard for any tenant.”

Also, Ontario does not have “real” rent control because the landlord is only obliged to follow the guideline for an existing tenant, he said.

“If you move into a unit, though, a landlord can charge you whatever he wants,” Dent said. “The last tenant could have been paying $500 a month and they can charge you $2,000.”

http://www.torontosun.com/news/canada/2011/01/02/16734661.html

I could have never imagined how hard it is to evict someone.

Wednesday, December 29th, 2010

To anyone interested in the services of Landlord legal –

I could have never imagined how hard it is to evict someone until I was faced with having to do it myself. It wasn’t until I started the process that I realized that it is impossible to do on your own without proper legal counsel. There are so many “t’s” and “i’s” that need to be crossed and dotted and if you miss one, you could lose a lot of time and money. That is when I contacted Landlord Legal.

The best part about April Stewart and her team at Landlord Legal is that they’re specialists. Evicting “bad” tenants for “good” landlords is all they do! I could have NEVER evicted my bad tenant on my own. He was a professional con who played the legal system with expertise. But what my bad tenant didn’t know was that April is more diligent and a lot smarter than he was. April’s a hard working, super persistent woman who is at the top of what she does and gets the job done, period.

I hope I never have to use April’s services again but should I ever need to, you better believe that the only person I will call before anyone else is “The Terminator!”
– Nick S, Toronto

Landlords get a bad deal when it comes to bad tenants

Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010

By Hugh Adami, Ottawa Citizen December 19, 2010

Why would anyone want to be a small landlord when there is little protection in Ontario from bad tenants?

Take Mike and Cathy Clarmo, who live in the Osgoode community of Edwards. The only way they could get a tenant to leave their rental property was with a cash payout of $3,000. And that was after 4½ years of watching the house’s resale value plummet because of their tenants’ neglect.

Their problems all started because the Clarmos couldn’t say no to an acquaintance who wanted to rent the three-bedroom bungalow they purchased in 2004. The Clarmos had just finished renovating the house when the man — a childhood friend of one of their sons — showed up at their doorstep in the spring of 2005. The couple had been planning to sell the property, which was just down the street from their home, and hoping for a $20,000-to-$25,000 profit to put toward retirement. Mike explained their plans, but the man persisted. He needed a place for his wife and children.

Mike said OK, figuring he would make some of the investment back in rent, and sell later, when the house was sure to be worth more.

Instead, cracks started appearing in their nest egg soon after the family moved in. “It broke our hearts to see the condition of the house deteriorate as it did,” says Cathy.

Probably the worst thing was that the house constantly reeked of animal urine.

The family had a dog, cat and rabbit. Drywall and floors were damaged. The garage was so cluttered that the couple was sure there was a fire risk.

Photos they took also show the front yard of the home littered with junk, including car parts such as engines and tires. The woman, who drove a school bus, damaged the eavestroughing after backing the vehicle into the house, Mike says. Rent was often late.

The Clarmos decided to sell the property after a business deal went sour. In April 2009, they gave the tenants more than two months of notice to vacate.

The tenants offered to buy the house “as is” for a reduced price. The Clarmos agreed. But the tenants couldn’t get a mortgage. The Clarmos abandoned their plan to sell after the husband approached Mike and tearfully told him he couldn’t find another house to rent.

A year later, they planned again to sell the house. But the husband, whose wife was no longer living with him, told Mike he was now well versed in tenants’ rights. He wasn’t going to move, and if Mike wanted to terminate the tenancy, he would have to go before the Landlord and Tenant Board.

Mike did so twice. He says he came away convinced that as the landlord, he was considered the bad guy.

At the first hearing, Mike spoke with a mediator, who suggested he allow his tenant to stay at the house rent-free for five months with the condition that he move by the end of this month. The man’s lawyer suggested that Mike could get him out by the end of October if he gave him a few thousand dollars on top of free rent for three months. Mike refused. He recalls the lawyer telling him that he would regret his decision as he was bound to lose the case.

Mike produced photos that he had taken of the house at the first hearing. The adjudicator joked about the one of the cluttered garage. “‘It looks like my garage,'” Mike recalls him saying. In his written decision, adjudicator Greg Joy dismisses or challenges every complaint made by the landlord.

The Clarmos found a prospective buyer for the home soon after and again applied to have the tenancy agreement terminated by Nov. 1, which was also the closing date of the sale.

The adjudicator in the second hearing reserved his decision, which allowed the tenant to stay put for at least the time being.

Mike’s lawyer suggested they give the tenant $2,000 to get out of the house. The tenant’s lawyer then came back with another figure — $3,000 — plus the demand that his client be allowed to stay until Nov. 15. Worried the board could rule in favour of the tenant and that the prospective buyers of the house would pull out of the deal, Mike agreed.

The former tenant would not return my calls.

The $3,000, which the couple feels was extortion, plus $1,400 in legal fees and $1,000 to refill the home’s oil tank are the smaller losses. The Clarmos did sell the house for $240,000 — about $25,000 more than what it cost them to buy and renovate the property in 2004. But the selling price was still a far cry from the $290,000 to $300,000 a real estate broker had told them the house would have been worth.

The Clarmos don’t know if they should be angrier with their tenants or the board.

They realize the board exists primarily to protect tenants, and with children, their tenant was bound to get even more sympathy. But, they say, their case illustrates the need for rules to protect the good landlords.

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Landlords+deal+when+comes+tenants/4000351/story.html#ixzz18dUrkiwP

Stacking the deck against Ontario landlords

Monday, December 13th, 2010

Stacking the deck against Ontario landlords

Remember the early-’90’s thriller Pacific Heights? A young San Francisco couple buy their dream house and rent out a portion to help pay the mortgage. When slick Carter Hayes — played by an oddly menacing Michael Keaton — rolls up in a Porsche and fancy suit, he seems like the perfect tenant. Twenty minutes later, Hayes becomes a slippery cockroach-breeding con artist who changes the locks on his door and quickly becomes a domestic bête noire.

It’s a made-up Hollywood tale — yet an instructive one. Consider that if Carter Hayes took up residence in an Ontario apartment building, the province’s 2007 Residential Tenancies Act would make it very difficult for his landlord to kick him out. Who knows: He might even be able to claim his cockroaches as protected “pets.”

The law appears to have been drafted on the assumption that all landlords are rich and greedy. Under the Act, a tenant can allow anyone to move into his or her unit indefinitely. So after you sign a lease for, say, a one-bedroom apartment, you can invite your unemployed buddies to come stay with you — forever. The Act does not require you to give names, addresses or references to the landlord. Even if you decide to move out, the scrubs can stay behind until they are formally evicted, which requires a court order … which, in some cases, the landlord cannot obtain because he doesn’t even know what name to put on the eviction notice.

Oh, and if your tenants feel like trashing the apartment à la Charlie Sheen while they live there — or just before they leave — they can. Tenants in Ontario are not required to pay a damage deposit, so if a tenant damages the property and the landlord discovers this when (or just after) the lease is up, the landlord has to spend his own time and money taking them to Small Claims Court. However, since tenants don’t have to give a forwarding address, the landlord can’t serve them court papers. As a result, either new tenants pay for the damage through increased rents, or (as is more likely) the landlord pays out of his own pocket.

Unlike normal contracts, Ontario residential leases are fairly meaningless unless they mirror the specifications set out in the Residential Tenancies Act exactly. For example, many landlords understandably do not want tenants with pets. Even if this restriction is expressly written into the lease, the Act allows tenants to bring in as many pets as municipal regulations allow. Which is lot: The City of Toronto Municipal Code states that a person can keep up to six of any combination of dogs, cats, ferrets and rabbits at any given time in their home.

The only thing worse than the Act is the Landlord and Tenant Board, which appears to be a body set up specifically to help tenants exploit their landlords. For example, even if a tenant just flatly refuses to pay rent, he/she is guaranteed a hearing under the Act. Further, if a tenant contacts the board and says he/she can’t make it to the hearing on the scheduled date, the hearing is postponed. This can happen repeatedly, and in the meantime the tenant continues to live rent-free in the property.

If the hearing ever happens, the tenant can completely blindside the landlord by bringing up random maintenance-deficiency claims. The claim does not have to be true or even make sense, and the tenant does not have to inform the landlord of the “deficiency” prior to the hearing. Nevertheless, on this basis, the board can award money to the tenant at the hearing — which often happens when landlords are trying to evict deadbeats.

Throughout all of this Kafkaesque ordeal, the landlord must play nice and be extra careful not to cause any offence. Repeatedly asking for the rent may be construed as “harassment” or “interference with reasonable enjoyment” of the property.

Roger Ebert called Pacific Heights “a horror film for yuppies.” But most Ontario landlords aren’t rich folks. They’re just small business people trying to get by. But thanks to the Residential Tenancies Act, they spend a lot of their time feeling as though they’re this close to …

Well, I’ll let you watch the movie.
Read more: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/12/07/iman-sheikh-stacking-the-deck-against-ontario-landlords/#ixzz1813fKmLz