Montreal City Weblog

Kate 19:25 on 2024-01-31 Permalink Reply  

• dhomas 19:55 on 2024-01-31 Permalink

  As a “propriétaire occupant” of a triplex, I do my best to be reasonable. I would really love to keep my rent hikes reasonable this year. However, my municipal taxes have increased by over 7% since last year (I just got the notice in the mail yesterday). Would M. Dorais like me to be as “reasonable” as the city is being with landlords? Or is a 7% rent increase unreasonable?

  I agree that landlords need to be reasonable (and I won’t actually raise the rent by 7%, though it will be higher than last year), but it’s a little rich coming from an administration that just put in place such a large increase in municipal taxes.

• value 22:42 on 2024-01-31 Permalink

  The only way the property value goes up a full 7% a year is speculation &/or gentrification.

  If your base tax rate is .8% of your property value (the Montreal average), the 7% increase is only 7% of .8%, so it’s only a .56% increase in what you pay in taxes in relation to the property value. I am sure any of your tenants would LOVE a .56% rent increase. If you are charging them 1500 a month, that would be $8.40.

  I’m not harassing you individually though, most people don’t understand math, which confuses a lot of converations between cities, landlords, and tenants. That landlords are allowed to increase their rents by a percentage of the rent instead of being directly tied to the property value is one of the reasons we are in a housing crisis.

• Michael 00:37 on 2024-02-01 Permalink

  Maybe there should be a board that arbitrarily decides how much Montreal can raise taxes by.

• MarcG 10:50 on 2024-02-01 Permalink

  Does anyone know how the city calculates property value?

• saintjacques 10:52 on 2024-02-01 Permalink

  > a board that arbitrarily decides how much Montreal can raise taxes by

  C’est a dire, comme un conseil municipal qui adopte le budget annuel de la ville?

• Ephraim 11:11 on 2024-02-01 Permalink

  @MarcG – The rate is standard, the city uses sales. You can go to https://servicesenligne2.ville.montreal.qc.ca/sel/evalweb/index and put in your address. In the corner is a square that says “visualiser les ventes” and you need your tax bill to see the code and it will give you some of the values it used to guess yours.

  But that is one part that really needs reform. The person doing the evaluation can be biased, your art, your decor and your furniture could change the value. And even parquet floors count as if they are solid wood floors. It should simply be by square footage.

• Michael 11:41 on 2024-02-01 Permalink

  @saintjacques

  Non, un regie de logement / taxes qui plafonne les augmentations entre 1% et 3 % augmente chaque année n’importe quoi.

• saintjacques 12:54 on 2024-02-01 Permalink

  @Michael
  Alors, une Régie d’annuller des conseils municipales, non-élu, capable de annuller les décisions d’un organe démocratiquement élu?

  People are huge fans of representative government until (a) it does something they don’t want it to do; or (b) doesn’t do something that they do want it to do. Then they want another layer of government to force the first layer to get (a) or (b) sorted out to their satisfaction. Then they’ll complain there is too much bureaucracy.

• DeWolf 18:04 on 2024-02-01 Permalink

  Michael is being facetious because he thinks there should be no rent controls, and if tenants get hit by a 30% increase, they should just suck it up or move to Trois-Rivières.

• Ian 21:02 on 2024-02-01 Permalink

  A nice 3 bedroom in an older building with interesting design features that has been kept up will still run you around 1500 even in Trois-Rivières.

• Michael 23:39 on 2024-02-01 Permalink

  DeWolf loves the fact the city can raise large amounts of taxes and nobody independent is there to put a cap on it.

  The less the city of Montreal is able to raise taxes, the less the rents get raised across the city.

  Unless you want to tell me you are a big fan of large tax increases because you are a bootlicker.

• saintjacques 09:34 on 2024-02-02 Permalink

  > the city can raise large amounts of taxes and nobody independent is there to put a cap on it.

  If only there was some mechanism by which – and work with me here – that the citizens of Montreal could periodically pass judgement on elected officials who collectively approve the city’s annual budgets, and could replace them with other, different elected officials who promised to approve annual budgets that included smaller tax increases.

• MarcG 11:15 on 2024-02-02 Permalink

  I own a modest single-family home valued around $540K and city taxes last year were $3704.50, and this year are $3994.46 – a 7.25% increase which comes to $24/month. Say a triplex is currently valued at $1.5 million – taxes this year are $12K and they were $11,160 last year, for an increase of $840 or a whopping $70 a month! Unless I’m missing something, a landlord saying “oh my property taxes went up 7% so your rent is going up 7%” is not sincere, since with 2 tenants paying $1500/month that would translate to an extra $210/month or $2520/year – a 2.4% rent increase to $1534.50 would more than cover it, and that’s with pushing the whole increase onto the tenants.

• dhomas 17:47 on 2024-02-02 Permalink

  So, I was obviously mentioning my 7% tax increase for dramatic effect. I could have been much more incendiary by quoting the 15.3% increase in this article, since I live in Anjou:
  https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/grand-montreal/2023-10-04/budget-des-arrondissements/des-hausses-de-taxes-locales-salees.php. Notice I said that I WON’T raise rent by 7% in the very next paragraph. Also, I very much understand math, @value, having majored in Statistics in university… (that was a little insulting, btw).

  I just find it comical that the city administration is telling landlords not to raise rents when they just raised our taxes. Rules for thee but not for me, and all that.

  All that said, the tax increase alone gives me reason to raise by 2.3% (though the TAL says more). This would mean 1125$/month for my (large) 5 and a half, as opposed to the 1100$/month my tenant is currently paying (I realize this is under market, but as I said, I’ve been trying to be reasonable). Plus regular maintenance costs increasing. Not to mention my mortgage is up for renewal this year and glob only knows how much more I’ll be paying per month. So, my increase will be more than 2.3%, despite not making any renos to the appartment this year. The TAL calculator tool tells me I should increase by 4.96%, so I’ll go with that and round down to an even 1150$/month.

  I’m not a real estate tycoon. I’m not raking in the cash on my property. I’m just a guy who absolutely wanted to live on the island and whose only path to home ownership was to subsidize my costs via rental revenue. I would NOT be able to afford my house if I wanted to buy it today. I would also very much like to not lose my house, so I must raise the rents to cover my new, higher expenses. If I were forced to sell, the next owner would 100% renovict my tenant and charge the going rate of 1750$ to 2000$/month for his appartment. Just like the house next door to mine did. They bought the house and “lived” in it for 1 year while they renovated. Now the rents are all double what they were (or more!).

  So, all that to say, not all landlords are the scummy slumlords you read about in the paper. Some of us are just regular folks trying to get by. And it’s not always easy.

• MarcG 10:03 on 2024-02-03 Permalink

  The message from Dorais is simply: don’t gouge your tenants, use the TAL calculator. He’s not saying that rents shouldn’t be raised at all. It’s is obviously not aimed at you.

• Kate 10:58 on 2024-02-03 Permalink

  Michael, I just caught up with what you wrote (“….because you are a bootlicker”) and find that phrasing offensive. Please find somewhere else to express your nasty attitude.