The city is creating a system of lease registry and landlord certification, at least for buildings of seven units and above.
Updates from February, 2022 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Shots were fired at a passing car in St‑Léonard on Monday evening but nobody turned up injured. CTV emphasizes it was a pedestrian who did the shooting. You have to watch out for those pedestrians, loose cannons all of them. They don’t even have to have a walkers’ permit.
qatzelok
“A lot of these so-called ‘pedestrians’ are racist, misogynistic and homophobic. They hide behind their lack of license plates in order to commit unspeakable atrocities against democratic drivers.”
Leadership
CE
Cool quote bro.
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Kate
A march was held Monday evening to commemorate missing and murdered indigenous women and press for more action on this matter.
EmilyG 13:20 on 2022-02-15 Permalink
But buildings with less than 7 units, which is many of them in Montreal, won’t need to register?
Joey 13:37 on 2022-02-15 Permalink
@EmilyG indeed. And why does it take five years to demand, collect and publish this information?
DeWolf 13:58 on 2022-02-15 Permalink
It’s being phased in over five years. Radio-Canada has a graphic explaining the rollout here:
https://twitter.com/B_Chapdelaine/status/1493617406836723714
My worry is that because landlords are only required to update their registry every five years, the whole system will be too slow-moving to really prevent the kind of rent hikes we’ve been seeing recently.
EmilyG 18:22 on 2022-02-15 Permalink
I used to live in a 6-unit building. The landlord got away with a lot of stuff he shoudn’t have. Though the rent hikes weren’t that bad compared to all the other stuff he pulled.
Ian 08:43 on 2022-02-16 Permalink
What a joke. In Mile End, mostly duplexes and triplexes, rents have effectively doubled in the last 5 years.
For that matter, I know that several Projet folks are landlords & it’s politically relevant that none of their properties (to the best of my knowledge) will fall within this new “system”.
steph 09:57 on 2022-02-16 Permalink
I’m surprised at the breakdown of how many units exist in each buitding type.
65000 total apartments in buidings with100+ units;
28000 total apartments in buidings with 60-99 units;
68000 total apartments in buidings with 24-59 units;
53000 total apartments in buidings with 12-23 units;
41000 total apartments in buidings with 8-11 units;
They say montreal has ~600,000 rental units… so 345,000 total apartments in buildings with 1-7 units.
ant6n 10:19 on 2022-02-16 Permalink
If they want to exclude owner-landlords, why not allow only individuals who own less than 5 (should really be 2) rental units, if they live at same building as those units to be excluded. But really y exclude them at all?
Joey 10:52 on 2022-02-16 Permalink
I am less convinced by Ian’s assertion (it’s because several PM honchos own plexes) and more by the notion that many PM voters are Plateau plex-owners, and many more are aspiring Plateau plex-owners. Developing an affordable housing policy toolkit that conveniently excludes from observation the many PM voters who, conceivably, are contrbuting to the housing crisis must seem to the mayor and her gang of leaders like a stroke of political genius. As steph points out, though, for ostensibly political reasons Mayor Plante has decided that only half the rental stock is worth studying and protecting. Now, it stands to reason that you ought to start with the biggest fish – hedge-fund backed multinational property management companies that own and operate huge quantities of rental units. So by all means focus rental rule enforcement on those units first and with extreme prejudice – but to pre-emptively exclude half of all tenants from even potential protection is ludicrous.
ant6n 11:00 on 2022-02-16 Permalink
@Joey
I get what you’re saying. But they arent completely “excluded” “from potential protection” – theres stillt he regie, you know.
mare 12:23 on 2022-02-16 Permalink
Despite being a landlord, I also think that *all* rental units should be part of this registry. My guess of why there is this ‘minimum 7 unit’ requirement is that it has an administrative and legal reason. Owners of bigger rental buildings need to be companies (you need commercial building insurance if there are more that 6 units) and they already have to file more extensive balance sheets and other forms each year. Some of those numbers might already be available to the city. There’s probably also already a law/bylaw that allows the city to conduct safety / fire inspections because the owners are businesses. Something like that.
It might be impossible for the city to change those laws to also apply to private landlords. And they certainly won’t get access to private landlord’s income tax records without changing the tax code province wide.
The total number of rental units in [x]plex-es owned by private landlords is smaller than @steph’s estimate when you look at the total population of Montreal of 2 million. A lot of people own their house, don’t live in the core boroughs, and don’t have tenants. That 600,000 is more likely the number of *renters*, and I guess that the average occupation per unit is in the 1.5 to 1.7 range. Using the lower number and subtracting the units in bigger buildings would mean that there are only 150,000 units in smaller buildings. Further guesstimating that an average plex has around 2 rental units, will yield a total of between 75,000 and 100,000 private owners.
(We can all agree that the commenters on this blog are not at all representative of the Montreal population, if only because they read an English language blog 😉 )
DeWolf 12:46 on 2022-02-16 Permalink
It seems obvious that all rental units should be covered by this new system, and I’m disappointed nobody in the media seems to be asking Projet for a clear explanation on why that is. But I’m inclined to agree with mare that the reason is probably bureaucratic more than anything else, and with Joey that the priority should be on the buildings owned by massive REITs and developers that have been very aggressively flouting the law in recent years.
Faiz Imam 13:10 on 2022-02-16 Permalink
I agree with Mare. I don’t think the reason for 7+ is a mustache twirling scheme to make sure small landlords are not implicated in the registry.
Starting a new database like this is hard enough as it is, im sure most owners will not want to participate and will have to be pushed (the legal maximium fine is small enough as it is) but if they have to spend all their time running after small building owners who probably dont have the right data, be even more ineffective.
I think this is a good place to start and get the ball rolling, but in a few years I would be dissapointed in the system were not expanded. At least to 4+
steph 13:33 on 2022-02-16 Permalink
I always imagined a system where tenants would submit the lease information to the registry, and landlords would be informed to validate or contest – counter submit. The responsibility goes both ways.
Haven’t landlords also been asking for a tenent registry to vet future renters? It’s too easy to dishonestly use a friend as a fake landlord: “Of course he’s a good tenant, always pays on time, never a complaint. I’m sad to see him leave”
EmilyG 14:26 on 2022-02-16 Permalink
If landlords have a tenant registry, I’d be screwed. My last landlord hated me so much that he revoked his promise to give me a good reference, and sent me a text saying he’s counting the days until I leave.
If you’re wondering why he considered me such a bad tenant – my landlord lived below me and was a light sleeper, in a very non-soundproof building. He hated it when I woke him up by walking on the floor after 9:30 PM or before 7:30 AM. (Including getting up in the middle of the night when I had to walk to the bathroom.) He really, really hated my typing on my computer, enough so that he yelled and swore at me through my door when I did it in the middle of the day (thinking that it wouldn’t bother him as long as it wasn’t late at night.)
He often sent me angry texts, yet when I dared express any bad feelings towards him (such as trying to remind him that he hadn’t yet fixed the things in my apartment that were supposed to have been fixed a while ago,) he called me rude, said I shouldn’t get so angry, and said that I complain more than any other tenant.
I can’t do much about how he treated me, other than to warn others never to rent from him.
Joey 15:24 on 2022-02-16 Permalink
So I think we’re losing sight of what the city is proposing. There’s no chance of the city creating any kind of tenant or landlord rating system. There are two concrete proposals: First, a program to certify properties as being secure and sanity, with property owners having to declare that their buildings are in the appropriate state every five years. I imagine this is the rental building equivalent of a co-property syndicate’s reserve fund and maintenance plan, which is also a recent (though provincially-created) obligation. I could see how it would be overzealous to apply this to, say, triplexes, especially if the city is supposed to do something beyond collecting this information.
Second, the city is requiring landlords of buildings with eight or more units (nice loophole, I think, for those who own more than eight units spread out across several buildings) to publish their lease amounts every five years. The idea is that tenants will have access to accurate, complete information on their unit’s historical lease amount – making it impossible for landlords to raise the rent beyond an acceptable amount (do leases still include the box for the previous rent? Do landlords still not fill it out or just outright lie?). It seems to me the benefit of every residential lease amount being published far exceeds the cost of spot-checking submissions to ensure accuracy. Landlords could also be required to submit a signed electronic copy of the lease, to help them resist the temptation to lie. I can’t imagine this would be an administrative nightmare to set up and manage, and I would expect that the $5,000/unit/day (Faiz: that’s small?) fine would generate enough revenue to make the whole thing basically cost-neutral.