Small landlords feeling squeezed out of rental market
March 4, 2011
Jennifer Brown
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
If you ask April Stewart whether she’d recommend the life of a small landlord, she’d probably try and discourage you, at least in Ontario.
A former property owner herself and a paralegal based in <a href=”http://www.barriehomeinspector.com”target=”_blank”rel=”external”title=”Barrie Home Inspector” >Barrie, who represents landlords trying to evict bad tenants, Stewart is also a member of the Ontario Landlords Association, a group representing small landlords who says they are feeling the pinch thanks to landlord/tenant laws that favour tenants.
“When I see someone, usually the problem has gotten pretty out of hand,” she says. “We’re actually encouraging people who are thinking about becoming landlords to spend their money in another province; it’s too scary here,” says Stewart. “I tell folks who call me and say they’re thinking about becoming a landlord that unless you can afford to carry that house and that tenant for a minimum of six months without it affecting your finances at all, do not do it. “
Stewart and other members of the OLA recently met with MPP Mike Colle and senior members of the Ministry of Housing to present their concerns. Primarily, they say, the current Residential Tenancies Act and Landlord and Tenant Board are prejudiced against landlords and favour tenants’ rights.
The OLA, which is a province-wide educational and networking group for landlords with six or less units, presented Colle and the ministry representatives with a top 10 list of issues of most concern to small landlords on Feb. 17.
“We shared with the Ministry of Housing the items that came from some polling we did on the Ontario Landlords Association website ( www.ontariolandlord.ca). Where do they feel they are getting burned?” she says. “One glaring example is that it’s for a tenant to take a landlord to court but it’s 0 for a landlord to take a tenant to court. Why? The prejudice is right at the counter when you’re filing. There’s a built-in assumption that landlords have all the money and tenants have none.”
Other issues include the OLA’s request for a return to damage deposits, a firm no pets clause in leases, the ability for landlords to search a prospective tenant’s history at the Landlord Tenant Board and the fact prior evictions are not admissible in current eviction proceedings. The OLA has also asked for the nine regional Landlord Tenant Board offices that closed in 2008 be re-opened.
The OLA’s website demonstrates the frustration of small landlords — it’s help forum has had over 40,000 posts in 18 months.
“I think the government and the ministry need to understand that we’re not interested in taking rights away from anybody; we just want some equity in this legislation and before the board. If there are this many stories, and if I’m this busy in my practice, it suggests there is a problem here and landlords aren’t getting a fair shake,” she says.
An area the OLA is studying is the number of evictions and failure to pay related to tenants receiving assistance from Ontario Works and Ontario Disability Support Program.
“I went through my 2010 eviction cases and separated what were tenants on support and 8,000 of rent arrears were with landlords who will never recover that money because they were folks on assistance who you can’t collect from them,” says Stewart.
Stewart, who is a single mother and a renter herself, says small landlords can’t afford to go through the appeal process with tenants who default on their rent. The process can often drag on in court for six to eight months, even longer.
“The small landlords can’t afford this happening to them. By the time they get through the eviction process and pay for someone to help them and not have the rent come in, it’s not a financially viable system. A landlord with fewer than 10 units can’t afford it and emotionally they can’t afford it,” says Stewart.
Small landlords represent about 40 per cent of the affordable <a href=”http://www.commercialbuildinginspector.ca”target=”_blank”rel=”external”title=”Commercial Building Inspector” >rental housing stock in Ontario. But that is starting to diminish, says Stewart, as property owners find it increasingly difficult to find good tenants. As someone who represents landlords when they’re having a problem evicting a tenant, she admits she sees the worst. The economy has also played a role in changing the landscape for property owners, she notes.
“I was a landlord in the 1990s in Barrie when the vacancy rate was next to nothing, but things have changed. The economy has changed, interest rates have driven good tenants, who have their financial act together, into home ownership. We’re often left with a less than savory pool of tenants to choose from,” she says.
Stewart says the OLA was “unofficially invited back” to speak to the Ministry of Housing in six months. At the same time, tenant groups are pushing for the province to provide greater rights to tenants over issues regarding repairs to buildings and the problem of bed bugs. But the OLA says the current laws in Ontario were created to protect tenants from large corporate landlords running huge buildings, not small business people renting a few units with few resources behind them.
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