Items for Moving Day
The city is offering help for people in a jam on Moving Day. Short version: if you have nowhere to go, call 311. The “balance” comes at the end with a perfunctory snipe from Ensemble. (Note to journalists: you don’t always need “balance” when it’s stupid and offers neither help nor insight.)
La Presse’s Suzanne Colpron says there are plenty of vacancies, although they’re unaffordable. I would add to that, from my observations working for the Census last summer, that there are a shocking number of apartments and flats held empty, at least in Villeray and Petite-Patrie where I was working – obviously empty places that were clearly not even on the market. Why property owners either hold places empty or price them out of reach, I do not know. Wouldn’t it be better to get $800 a month for a year than get $0 because you hoped to get $1200?
dhomas 11:22 on 2022-07-01 Permalink
I’m a landlord, and I think a pretty fair one. I also now help my mother-in-law with her rental unit. Her house has been paid for years, so her rental unit is j mostly gravy for her (after municipal, school taxes, etc.). Her house is in a still-gentrifying area of Rosemont. When my mother-in-law’s last tenants left, she was happy to continue getting 900$/month for her 5&1/2. There is a large, slummy apartment building at the corner of her street. The small units there were going for about 900$/month, too. I told her she should increase the rent to stay competitive since her unit was much bigger and nicer than the slummy units on the market nearby. Why would someone rent one of those slums when they could get a renovated 5&1/2 for the same price? Well, long story short, she got some pretty horrible tenants that trashed the place. And that’s why I now help her with her apartment.
But this is one reason why some may keep their units empty. It could end up costing more in repairs than you bring in, and owners who don’t have a mortgage to pay just don’t want to be bothered.
Spi 12:42 on 2022-07-01 Permalink
@dhomas nails it on the head, I know a few duplex owner/occupant (some inherited) who are financially secure and don’t need the rental income and after having gone through years of nightmare tenants/neighbours, who are just plainly unpleasant people, or having to deal with the revolving door of lease transfers for their below market price unit have opted to leave it empty.
For those who live in their building it’s not just about the income, it’s also about their living environment.
mare 12:49 on 2022-07-01 Permalink
It could be what @dtomas said.
It can also be because a ‘loophole’ in the rental code. After one year of an apartment being empty landlords can *legally* ask any rent they want. If they can double or triple the rent of a $500 apartment, it pays back the loss of rent in a year or less, and your building did increase in price as well.
Also, if someone is planning to sell a multi-unit investment building in the next few years, the asking price is set as [yearly rents * 20] (that number varies per location). So if they can hold off on setting that rent until the sale (and mention it as ‘potential revenu’) it can make a *huge* difference. A rent difference of $400 could mean a $100,000 higher selling price. That easily offsets a couple of years of no rental income, and less hassle and chance of bad tenants.
A building in our street was recently sold for much less than it was worth (I’m friendly with the landlord/owner who lives on the ground floor). Main reason was that it had one of those bad tenants. He pays a very low rent, lives in a crappy apartment but will never move until he can’t climb the stairs anymore. On top of that he regularly plays loud music (and not only when potential buyers visited, although he put the level at 11 then), often with a speaker on his balcony so the whole street can enjoy.
Kate 13:30 on 2022-07-01 Permalink
I told her she should increase the rent to stay competitive
dhomas, I don’t understand this. Isn’t this the philosophy that’s driving up prices for everything right now? If a person is satisfied to get $900 a month from their flat, and they don’t need more, why is it objectively better for them to charge $1200?
Meezly 15:22 on 2022-07-01 Permalink
I think I can see dhomas’ point. People usually base their search within a range they can afford, so $900/month will have a higher chance of attracting the type of tenant that may trash a place vs someone who can afford more “competitive”rent. But I didn’t know that rental prices can affect the market value of a building.
dhomas 16:16 on 2022-07-01 Permalink
I’m not a fan of raising rent for no reason. That said, before I started helping out my MIL, she hadn’t raised the rent from 900$ for a number of years because she was happy getting that much and her tenant gave her no problems. However, the situation in the neighbourhood changed and gentrification set in. Now, the crappy apartments around her rent for 900$. It’s a matter of differentiating her “nice” apartment from the crummy ones across the street. Instead, she had to deal with a shitty tenant for 2 years that left her apartment in ruins, on top of losing sleep due to constant noise above her. She had to spend about $18k to renovate the place, so she barely broke even over the period she rented it. Imagine if she had a mortgage to pay, like I do? She’d be deep in the hole.
Ephraim 16:40 on 2022-07-01 Permalink
Kate – Here’s the other side of it… the rent you charge also attracts certain people and makes you unappealing to certain people. My parents had a bachelor apartment for rent in their house in the 70s. The rent was $50 a month, equivalent to about $350 today. That included heating, electricity, hot water, and furnished, including a fridge (not frost free), stove/oven, bed, couch, dresser, etc. I don’t know how many times people ran out on my parents before they just stopped renting, figuring it wasn’t worth the hassle.
The people who lived in the upstairs of the duplex also had heating and electricity in their rent. Eventually, my parents had to put in a bypass on their thermostat. Why? Because in the middle of winter they would open all their windows and my parents heating bill would skyrocket.
Being a landlord can also be open to abuse. Sure, sometimes you just get the right people and you just want to keep it rolling. But one experience with the wrong people and you are willing to walk away forever as well.
Kate 18:06 on 2022-07-01 Permalink
So basically, anyone making below a certain income level can safely be discarded as trash. Good to know.
Blork 20:06 on 2022-07-01 Permalink
I might be splitting hairs here, but here goes. There are a lot of shitty people out there. Way too many. And they are shitty AF. But here’s the thing: being poor doesn’t make you shitty. But being shitty might make you poor. Also: shitty people, poor or not, will always go for the cheapest rent they can find. That’s part of their overall shittyness (being cheap AF and not caring about things). So unfortunately these shitty people skew the numbers by being more present in the lower income groups than the higher income groups, and therefore smearing all lower-income people with the pong of their shittyness. (Higher income shittyness is a whole other thing, to be outlined in detail in a future comment.)
dhomas 21:20 on 2022-07-01 Permalink
Thank you, Blork. I was trying to formulate this very thought, but I could not have expressed it any better than you did.
And @Kate I disagree with your statement. In my very specific example, there were apartments available to people making lower income, right across the street. Why would a larger, nicer apartment rent for the same price? In my MIL’s case, the shitty tenants were a young couple of students. They broke up and a string of colocs came and went over two years. There was no reason these students NEEDED a 3 bedroom apartment. They ONLY took it because “why not” at the same price as the slummy apartment.
We’ve since rented to a young family who are not particularly well off, but are able to make the higher rent. We ran a credit check and all, and we saw that they get government assistance, but that’s a-ok by me. Helps pay for rent.
My own 5&1/2 is rented to a single father of 2 below the poverty line (I’ve seen his government documents).
Sorry for the verbose post. J’me sentais vise. :p
Ephraim 21:34 on 2022-07-01 Permalink
@Kate – That’s where things like interviews and verifying the credentials/information of people makes the difference. I would rather have someone with long-term employment, etc. But the average person doesn’t have the resources to check such things and of course, the government blocks you from other ways of protecting yourself, other than going to court and holding a 30 year document over someone that still requires you to find them WHEN they have the money and pay a bailiff to get it and enforce it. Noovo used to have a whole show about the Bailiffs in Quebec.
Sure, it’s nice that I can get a 30 year judgement… we had a guy at work who had a 30 year judgement on him. The week the bailiffs finally found him to attach his salary was the last week he worked at that office. He would do the same thing every time they found him… so they didn’t collect much on the judgement. It just kept on growing and growing and growing. Didn’t do well for him, didn’t do well for the landlord, didn’t do well for justice… but the bailiffs kept on making money, since they had to be paid to serve the documents each time they found him.
We need a much better system. One that helps the landlord and the tenant and works better for those who need it. But every idea gets blocked. What we need is to get the abusers out of the system without it costing the landlords. Why? Because every cost to a landlord is eventually going to be a cost to the tenant, the present or future tenant.
If a tenant is late, you have to wait for 21 days before you can apply to have them evicted. So you have already lost a month’s rent by the time you apply. You need to spend your time and money to get the tribunal to issue the eviction order. It SHOULD take 30 days, by which time you have lost another month’s rent, but can take a lot longer. And if the tenant pays that rent at any time before the final judgement, the clock entirely resets and you have to start from zero. So you could start on the next month’s rent, that wasn’t paid, but the clock is at zero. And of course, people who learn to abuse this part of the system… aren’t going to be taking care of your property. And in the end, this hurts EVERYONE.
Kate 21:53 on 2022-07-01 Permalink
OK, sorry everyone. I feel stung, and I feel scared, because while I’m not going hungry, I’m not well off, and while I can afford the place where I live now, should anything go pear‑shaped with this place, I’m likely to end up in a one-room basement next to a furnace, and my cat would probably have to go to the SPCA.
Joey 23:07 on 2022-07-01 Permalink
Landlords – like tenants – are a diverse group. There’s a substantial difference between people renting out two floors of the plex they own (and live in) and the Shiller-Lavys of the world. Unfortunately, we seem to have a legal framework for rentals that can’t distinguish one from the other, much like it can’t distinguish serial problem tenants from everyone else.
EmilyG 09:56 on 2022-07-02 Permalink
I’ve only had bad experiences with landlords.
My last one lived below me and sent me nasty sweary angry texts if I made any slight sound (and the building was very not-soundproof.) He hated it when I would get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, because that involved walking across my bedroom floor and he was a light sleeper. Not to mention the time he yelled at me through the door, calling me a fucking idiot and fucking moron, because I dared to type on my computer in the middle of the day.
When I said I was leaving, he said he was glad, that he wouldn’t give me a positive reference to any future landlords, and that he was counting down the days until I left.
I really don’t know if I can ever try renting an apartment again.
Kevin 10:12 on 2022-07-02 Permalink
Housing in the entire country is out of whack, and it really should be a core issue for some political party.
We really need something on the scale of the post-WWII push for affordable housing for working class people, and it’s got to be based around functional neighbourhoods with shops and walkability.
It’ll mean different things in different parts of the country, and probably mean expropriations and special laws, and a lot more, but we need it.
Kate 12:21 on 2022-07-03 Permalink
Kevin, you are so right. If the NDP wanted to actually rise out of its somnolence again it should focus on housing to the exclusion of all else, and really drive the issue into the foreground. But I don’t think they have the mojo.