Paying tenants to vacate a property that we as landlords want to renovate is standard practice. The building will get spruced up – sometimes gutted and rebuilt – and the tenants have an incentive to move on. That’s fine until you have a rental market like we have right now in Canada’s major cities. Vancouver has a vacancy rate of .9% and the Greater Toronto Area is not much better. There just aren’t any new homes for tenants to move to at comparable rates. If a tenant has lived in a building for many years, their current rent could be as much as 50% or 60% lower than the going rate. And tenants who have stayed put in one rental for that length of time are likely to be vulnerable members of society: elderly, infirm, working poor families. It doesn't feel good to move along people in need, so the right thing to do is hire a realtor who can find these tenants a new home. Unfortunately, since Canada has so little housing for its growing population, any replacement accommodation is guaranteed to cost more than what these displaced tenants can afford. I don't have any solutions to this issue – if I did, I’d be in politics. What disturbs me however is how some ill-intentioned people use tenant protection laws to game unsuspecting landlords. They move from building to building, fail to pay rent, and run out the clock on the eviction process. They know that the long, bureaucratic eviction process and the giant backlog some municipalities have before cases are heard, protects them for months, even years. They might even trash the place before they move to the next rental they plan to squat in, and start the whole extortion scheme all over again. It’s extortion, because these professional squatters are protected by the law and demand large sums of cash from property owners to leave. Real estate investors are viewed as rich, landed gentry who deserve to be taken advantage of – even if they are just mom and pop investors, trying to make a go of things. The story below was compiled by CBC TVs investigative unit and is worth viewing. The story’s intro is as follows: Some small landlords say they're facing outrageous demands from tenants to hand back the keys. CBC's Ioanna Roumeliotis breaks down what’s behind the rise in "cash for keys" deals and why advocates say it's time tenants got the upper hand. PLEASE SUPPORT LOCAL JOURNALISM, INCLUDING THE CBC
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Cameron MorrellBusiness Educator Archives
November 2024
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