Watertown Landlord Gets Schooled On Social Issues With Mentally Ill Tenant

Add this to the curious personalities file. J. Clancy Hopkins, a landlord in Watertown NY got an eyeful when he recently opened the front door of a unit in his apartment building. He found his first floor, furnished apartment was adorned with biblical quotes and sayings a la Kevin Spacey’s apartment in Seven. The tenant, Mark Stewart, changed the locks and refused to let him have a key. Besides the art project, the tenant had also done other damage. The top of the living room’s steel radiator was sheared off, the kitchen sink was removed, window and other moulding had been stripped and a closet had been ripped apart. All in all – about $25,000 worth of damage.

When Mr. Hopkins acted decisively to remove the tenant, he called in City Constable Patricia J. Hennegan, who immediately recognized Mr. Stewart’s name, and proceeded to share a long list of other landlords who had been affected by Mr. Stewart’s penchant for religious decoration in units he rents out. Five year ago, Perry F. McIntosh, a landlord who owns 54 units in 11 local buildings, had to evict Mr. Stewart from an apartment because of similar damage he did, the landlord recalled.

Mr. Hopkins said he wants to know why he did not find out about his former tenant’s past before he moved in.

The Jefferson County Department of Social Services knew about Mr. Stewart’s past when it placed him in the apartment four months ago, he said. He wonders why he wasn’t told about his history of doing the same thing to other units. According to the piece, the situation has opened his eyes about the people who live in Watertown and have fallen through the cracks. As a result of what happened to the apartment, Mr. Hopkins is pushing for community support services for the mentally ill to remain the same at the St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center, Ogdensburg, as the state Office of Mental Health decides its fate.

Vacancy Rate Hits 7.8% in Prince Edward Island

Came across this interesting piece this morning. The vacancy rate in Prince Edward Island’s urban centers hit 7.8%. According to the CMHC, this is a 3% increase versus last year. The number of vacant rental units in Charlottetown (the province’s capital) jumped to 8.7 per cent in April, which isa 5% increase in the same month last year. The CMHC cited the developments of new units as the biggest factor in the increase. No kidding.

The country’s a bit all over the place in parts when it comes to vacancy rates. Ottawa’s vacancy rate has increased. Hotbed Calgary has seen a significant decrease. Overall, Canada’s vacancy rate has seen a slight increase according to the CMHC.

Landlords, Tenants, and Floods. This Is For You Alberta.

Came across this great piece at Law Now, that touches on the mess that Alberta’s floods have wreaked on both landlords and tenants in the province. The Centre for Public Legal Education Alberta has developed an info sheet to help people – both landlords and tenants-to understand their rights and responsibilities after the terrible flood.

There are a lot of great “pro tips” here, but one thing in particular jumped out at me when reading the fact sheet. The definition of a “frustrated tenancy”. According to the CPLEA, it’s as follows:

A rental agreement can be frustrated, which occurs when something happens that is out of the control of both parties, and makes continuing with the agreement impossible. There are many reasons why a tenancy can be frustrated including if the property is destroyed, if there is an order under the Public Health Act that says the property is unfit for human habitation, if the property is so damaged that a reasonable landlord would not fix the damage, or if it is so damaged that a reasonable tenant would not be willing to remain living there.

Check out the fact sheet here. It’s great.

Ottawa’s Vacancy Rate Has Almost Doubled Since Last Year

Landlords  in the national capital region – take notice! Ottawa’s vacancy rate has almost doubled since last year according to this piece by the CBC.

John Dickie, chair of the Eastern Ontario Landlord Organization, estimates there are roughly 4,000 empty or soon-to-be empty apartment units in the capital. Last April, the vacancy rate was reported to be 2.1%. This year – it’s 3.7%. That’s a pretty sharp increase. To top that off, the Ontario LTB announced  yesterday that the allowable provincial rent increase for 2014 will only be 0.8%. You can get the lowdown on the guideline from the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing website. This is the lowest rent increase since 1975.

In an effort to paint a fair view of the situation, here’s some interesting stats to chew on, courtesy of the Ministry’s site:

  • The average rent increase guideline from 2004 to 2013 was 2.1 per cent. The average rent increase guideline from 1993 to 2003 was 3.1 per cent.
  • The guideline is calculated under the Residential Tenancies Act, 2006, which came into force on Jan. 31, 2007. The calculation is based on the Ontario Consumer Price Index, a measure of inflation that is calculated by Statistics Canada.

The province has committed itself to making a push for affordable housing for Ontario tenants, amid what The Toronto Star reported as a crisis across the province, 4 days ago.

Here’s the kicker with all of this – the rental market vacancy rate is calculated by looking at apartments in buildings that are three units or larger, and does not include condos or homes for rent. Uncertainty in the national capital region’s public service job market is speculated to be lending itself to the rise in the rate. Some analysts also suggest the increase of condo rentals could be contributing to the high vacancy rate as well, as condo units compete with traditional apartments. Kind of hard to dispute this if you ask me. Condo landlords are offering tenants pretty nice amenities and brand new units. This is all kind of upping the game for landlords who enjoyed minimal efforts with marketing centrally located units that kind of leased themselves.

What do you think? Share your comments and thoughts.

Vancouver Landlords May Lose The Right To Deny Tenants With Pets

Came across this great article by Jesse Ferreras at the Huffington Post B.C. As landlords, all of us have been faced with the question of renting to a pet owner. Denying tenancy because of a pet is often assumed by tenants to be an issue related to concerns about damage, but the truth is there’s more to it than that – on both sides of the equation.

Let’s backtrack though, and talk about what’s going on in Vancouver. As of right now, landlords in Vancouver have the right to refuse potential occupants with animals. However,  councillor Tim Stevenson recently tabled a motion at city hall, which already has the support of Mayor Gregor Robertson, that would prevent landlords from discriminating against renters on the basis of whether or not they own a pet. In an effort to know and learn all of the facts, chew on these tasty bullets:

  • Similar legislation has been in place in Ontario for more than 10 years. Both the mayor and councillor Stevenson argue that if it can work in Canada’s most populous province, it can work in Vancouver.  
  • 50% of Vancouver households are renting. With an average home price in the 700 thousands out west, this is the reality.
  • Every year, more than 100 pets are surrendered to the BC SPCA because of the current rules.
  • Vancouver’s vacancy rate hovers slightly above 1%.
  • There’s a an easy to see legitimate problem with people finding housing in a city where it’s clearly too expensive for many people to buy already.

Quite the municipal challenge there. Seriously.

The BC SPCA is leading the charge in an effort to inform landlords of the benefits of renting to a pet owner. I can see both sides of the equation here, and you’re forced to consider all of the facts in the situation. As a landlord in Ontario, while I obviously don’t have a no pets policy. I’m particular about keeping on top of this with a few of my tenants who do have pets. It’s not easy.

Full disclosure. My units are closely situated from one another, and I’ve had more than my share of complaints over the years from some of my tenants about barking from the one tenant I have with a dog. I also had a previous tenant in the last 3 years whose jerk dog badly damaged a unit (they refused to accept responsibility after assuring me their schnauzer was a trained, wonderful, and quiet dog. I was forced to take them to the board and ended up winning a judgement. Then the tenant dropped off the face of the earth and I never got paid the $700 they owed me).  I come across as many people when I’m in search of a new tenant who indicate they have allergies and an aversion to pet dander as I do with people who have pets. I have other tenants who have pet allergies. Juggling all of these things is not easy. All of my pet issues have been related to dogs. Never had an issue with a cat or other small animal.

The right of tenants to have pets is not unfettered in Ontario.  The pets must not become a nuisance and those same pets can not interfere with the reasonable enjoyment of the premises by other tenants or the landlord. There’s recourse with the LTB in the event that a pet becomes a problem. There is recourse in the event that a tenant with a pet doesn’t live up to their end of the bargain, however, any landlord knows that controlling the situation in the here and now is significantly more challenging. You have to prove damage or issue, and that’s not as easy as it sounds.

Vancouver is obviously a unique situation vs. most other cities in the country. With it’s high concentration of renters, I can appreciate where the mayor and the councilman are coming from, and their motion is noble. What do you think? Share your thoughts or comments with us. Have you ever had an issue with pets? What do you think of this motion?

The Do’s and Dont’s of Eviction For Repairs in British Columbia

God Bless Lisa N. Mackie. She’s a lawyer at Alexandar Holburn Beaudin and Lang LLP in good ole’ Vancouver. She wrote an article at Mondaq about what you can and can’t do when evicting a tenant for repairs in B.C. Is this worth a read? Uh…YES. Check it out here.

Her advice is well thought out and includes some other tips besides the obvious stuff. She suggests reading the law and broaching the subject with your tenant carefully. As you may or may not know, B.C. law requires that before issuing a “2 Month Notice to End Tenancy“, the landlord needs to have all of the necessary permits required by law to conduct the repairs or renovations, and the landlord must intend in good faith to renovate or repair in a manner that requires the suite to be vacant. The landlord also has to compensate the tenant the equivalent of one month’s rent on or before the move-out date.

Read the article here.

Saskatchewan Kyboshes Rent Controls

The  provincial government in Saskatchewan says it will not implement a system of rent control for residential tenants in the province. This was in response to the plight of a group of tenants who live in a building on Regina’s Robinson Street who received notices of a 77% increase in their rent. Wow.

The province’s Justice minister, David Wyant, explained that he thinks a rent control system would discourage property owners from improving their units.

We believe that it’s a disincentive to improving properties,” says Wyant. “it’s a disincentive to the establishment and for the building of new rental accommodations and we’ve seen that across the province and we’ve seen that across the country.”

Wyant added that he believes most rent increases have been around three to four per cent. He also offered to meet with the affected tenants personally and has also set up a meeting for them with the rentalsman’s office.

Landlords who belong to the Saskatchewan Rental Housing Industry Association have to give six months notice of rent increases. Other landlords have to give 12 months notice. In this case, the property management company who looks after the units did in fact give the required notice regarding the rent increase.

Canadian Real Estate Needs An Innovative Kick In The Ass

Small landlords are a component of arguably one of the least innovative markets on the web in Canada: real estate. When it comes to using services in the cloud, it’s a bit behind the pack. Strange, because in many ways, it’s a perfect example of a market  that can most benefit from using the convenience and utility of web based tools and services.

In an age where we see startups taking hard transformative glances at some of the most everyday things people do (couponing, group discounts, betting, customer relationship management, even organizing recipes), it’s difficult to understand why the Canadian real estate market in general has seemed to suffer from being left out in the cold – a frozen winter that is dated designs, unfriendly user interfaces, and a general sense of being stuck in the era of the internet pre-iPhone – when Internet Explorer 6 and Hotmail were standards.

A perfect example of this is Canada’s leading residential real estate listing service – Realtor.ca (formerly MLS.ca). Sure – it’s useful. It does the job – but it could really be a lot better. Canada’s number 1 visited real estate website hasn’t changed that much in over 10 years – and 2009’s mobile version of the application was met with as much enthusiasm as Microsoft’s Zune. Great idea – bad execution. It’s particularly embarrassing when you see what’s going on south of the border with great sites like Trulia and Zillow.com

So why is this? Is it possible that this market is controlled by a select group of barons – an old boys club so to speak – that just refuses to embrace the revolution that is Web 2.0?  The internet’s already in the throes of discussing what Web 3.0 is going to look like. We’re not sure. Is it too boring? It’s not a black and white situation. CREA has been fighting with the Competition Bureau about opening up the MLS database so that other sites and services can use it too. It’s been a real bone of contention. I’m not interested in making a comment on the spat between them. I’m simply pointing out that innovation on the web in Canadian real estate is perhaps being compromised because of it, and it doesn’t have to be. I’d love CREA to revamp the hell out of Realtor.ca and give some of these U.S. sites a run for their money. It feels like a bit of the Blackberry vs. iPhone/Android scenario. Come on! Canada’s real estate market is among some of the best in the world.

Back in 2008 – a little Canadian startup called Zoocasa entered the scene, hell bent on changing what a real estate listing looked like and how you found and searched for a home. It was “Home Search With Smarts”. It was developed as a slicker, more efficient alternative to the Multi Listing Service, and aimed at using the web to browse the housing market intelligently. These guys are a Rogers Ventures business – an impressive fact on it’s own. While the execution was great, realtors are required to post their listings proactively to the service, and there’s been issues with Realtor.ca in the past with “scouring” listings. Zoocasa was also successfully sued recently by Century 21 in Canada, and lost cases with individual realtors who took issue with the company “scraping” listings to populate it’s service.

The landlord market is no different. Most of the products for professional property managers and self managing owners seem like they’re geared more for corporations than landlords who have a secondary suite. Television shows like Income Property promote the benefits of having a subsidized mortgage, which has spurned increasing numbers of people to invest in duplexes and triplexes in the climbing Canadian real estate market of the last 10 years. It’s been a good ride and a lot of people have made a lot of money – but when it comes to “managing” a rental, it seems like you’re better off to keep that old manual ledger you picked up at Staples 10 years ago. Dust it off buddy – you’re a landlord now.

That’s changed in the last few years, and there’s been a series of new startups focusing on the small time landlord that have received a significant amount of attention, and in some cases, a significant amount of capital investment. Cozy – a San Francisco based startup –  is an example of that. Raising 1.5 million dollars of funding from the likes of Google Ventures and business guru and internet sensation Gary Vaynerchuk. Their aim of focusing on the two biggest pains in the butt for landlords – rental applications and tracking payments – takes a radically simplified look at the job of owning and managing rental property.

There are even cooler examples within the greater real estate realm. Lovely – another San Francisco based startup – has elegantly innovated the common apartment search for renters. One of the more interesting examples I recently came across which is real estate related, is The Dirt, a cool startup out of Toronto – that aims to populate it’s own property database “socially”. Cool idea. Their idea is about the sharing of information vs. Zoocasa’s aim to enhance what existed with MLS.

So what’s going on real estate? Share your thoughts with us.

No One’s Happy with Rent Increase Propositions In Québec

Read this piece yesterday in the Montreal Gazette. The province’s Régie du logement du Québec announced proposed rent hikes for 2013 on January 25th, and the ire of both landlords and tenants was clear in about 3 seconds after the announcement was made. This is the thing though, the province’s proposal for rent increases are in fact just meant as guidelines – a starting point if you will. Actual rent increases are negotiated between landlords and tenants. The province’s press release even states – “it’s meant as a starting point in the discussion of how much the rent will increase“. In other words, they just give their two cents on where they think the talking point should begin. Ultimately, landlords and tenants have to hash it out.

Quebec’s rental board has announced a 0.9 per cent increase in rents for buildings heated by electricity, a 0.2 per cent rise for buildings heated by gas and a 1.7 per cent rise for dwellings heated by fuel oil.

The Association des Propriétaires du Québec, blasted the suggested hikes as inadequate. Anti-poverty group FRAPRU said the hikes were too high, pointing out that the number of cases filed against tenants for not paying their rent hit a record in fiscal 2011-2012, rising 3.2 per cent to 47,049, compared to the previous year. Something else to note here – the vacancy rate has crept up in Greater Montreal from 2.5 to 2.8 per cent according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.

  • You can find the press release from the Régie du logement du Québec here
  • You can read FRAPRU’s press release here

What do you think? Are you a landlord in Quebec? What are your thoughts on how the system works for you? Share your stories with us.

2013 Rent Increases for Canadian Landlords

We’re a couple of weeks into 2013! We’ve compiled a list of the allowable provincial rent increases for Canadian landlords, for tenancies that fall into 2013. Keep in mind – not all provinces have rent controls. Here goes.

  • Ontario‘s 2013 rent increase is 2.5 %. You can check it out here.
  • In Quebec, some specific rules apply to residential rent increases. For leases longer than 12 months, the landlord and the tenant are free to adjust the rent during the course of the lease. If the duration of the lease is 12 months or less, the rent may not be increased during the course of the lease. There is no cap on rent increases or fixed rates of increase however the tenant must be given proper notice in writing. Read about it here.
  • Prince Edward Island‘s allowable 2013 rent increase is 5% for a heated premises, 3% for an un-heated one, and 1.5% for a mobile dwelling in a mobile park . You can check it out here.
  • British Columbia‘s allowable increase for 2013 is 3.8%. You can check it out here.
  • In Manitoba, the allowable rent increase for 2013 is 1%. Read about it here.
  • Saskatchewan‘s details are here. No increases are allowed during a fixed-term lease unless the landlord and the tenant agree to the amount of the increase and time when an increase is to come into effect at the time they enter into the fixed term tenancy.
  • There are no rent controls in Alberta. Rent can only be increased if there has not been a rent increase within the previous 365 days or since the start of the tenancy, whichever is later. Before the rent can be increased the landlord must give proper written notice. For mobile home sites, 180 days notice must be given by the landlord to raise the rent. Read about it here.
  • In Nova Scotia, the allowable rent increase for 2013 is 3%. Read about it here.
  • There are no rent controls in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories. A landlord may not increase the rent for a rental premises more than once every 12 months. The landlord must give at least 3 month’s written notice of the increase. Check out the act here. Special note on section 47.1
  • There are no rent controls in Yukon. A landlord may not increase the rent for a rental premises more than once every 12 months and not within the first year of a formal tenancy. The landlord must give at least 3 month’s written notice of the increase. You can read more here.