Office towers, condos and apartment buildings in the downtown and the west end of Vancouver, on Jan. 19, 2023.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
Linda de Gonzalez is not surprised some tenants in British Columbia are still being asked by their landlords to agree to double-digit rent hikes or else have their unit sold and the new owner kick them out so they or their immediate family can move in.
The retired bookkeeper was terrified last spring that she and her two small parrots, a Goffin’s cockatoo and a purple-naped lory, would soon be living in her car after refusing the owner’s request to agree to a 40-per-cent rent hike on the two-bedroom suite she has inhabited for past two decades in Vancouver’s sprawling suburb of Surrey.
Though she was initially unaware of her right to refuse to negotiate, she and more than two dozen tenants of other “undervalued” apartments in their 70-unit building began talking and organizing to get media and political attention to quash the landlords’ attempt to raise rents way above the 2-per-cent cap allowed by the province in 2023. This year, she says her rent has risen within the legal limit of 3.5 per cent for 2024, to slightly over $2,000.
The Globe and Mail reported on the conflict at her Surrey building a year ago. Since then, the tactic of pressing tenants to accept huge rent increases has remained a perfectly legal win-win for landlords: If they get written permission, they can raise rent well above the legal limit. And, if the renter leaves, they can charge a new person more in line with a rental market that has skyrocketed since the pandemic.
Landlords and their advocates argue that in recent years their operating costs have ballooned because of rising interest rates, utilities, property taxes, and repair costs while the provincial government put a moratorium on raising rents during the first two years of the pandemic and then pegged such increases below inflation for this year and last.
Spooked renters intermittently ask for advice on social media on how to handle these requests for huge spikes in their rent, but British Columbia’s Residential Tenancy Branch (RTB) says it can’t track these cases because people hardly ever lodge an official complaint.
However, tenants like Ms. de Gonzalez, non-profit organizations who fight on their behalf and the provincial Minister of Housing all say no one should accept these deals. And even if the unit gets sold, the new owner has the same rules and can evict tenants only if they or their immediate family are moving in.
“The defiant 14-year-old within me who kind of ran my life last year wants you to call the bluff and say, ‘fine, go ahead and see how far that gets you,’” said 70-year-old Ms. de Gonzalez, who is also a member of the anti-poverty organization ACORN BC. “I get it from the landlord’s perspective, they’ve got a mortgage and they’re paying an increased rate, but that should be part of your business plan as a property owner: That interest rates rise and fall and you need to be prepared for contingencies.”
If a tenant complains to the RTB about landlord pressure to renegotiate rent, the agency typically can’t do much if the renter agrees to it. But, the tribunal said in a statement, it could be considered harassment if an owner is continually putting pressure on their existing tenants and renters should always contact its weekday hotline if they’re having issues.
John Jurinak, whose company owns Ms. de Gonzalez’s building and three others in and around Vancouver, says smaller landlords are increasingly contemplating getting out of the business given the poor returns in recent years.
“Every single operating expense has gone up a lot: Wages, garbage, hydro, gas, you name it and at the end of the day it’s not an attractive business to be in,” he said.
Mr. Jurinak said he believes many landlords won’t reinvest in their properties because they don’t have the “excess cash flow anymore like they maybe once did.” In this environment, he said, tenants are going to start noticing buildings aren’t being maintained to the same standard they were before the pandemic.
B.C.’s Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon said his government is helping these landlords by recalibrating the legal rental cap to once again tie it to the rate of inflation later this year. He said his government also sped up the time it takes the RTB to get a dispute adjudicated. The NDP government has also created a new system to ensure landlords don’t have to go to court to recover rent owed by a tenant, Mr. Kahlon said.
But, he stressed, renting a home to someone comes with responsibilities and risks.
“If they don’t want to be landlords, no one is forcing them,” he said Thursday in a phone interview.
One per cent of Canadians were evicted in the year prior, or 3 per cent of all renters in the country, according to an April report from Statistics Canada. The national agency also found that the top reason (30 per cent) for being ousted was someone’s landlord wanting to use the unit for themselves.
That tracks with what Robert Patterson is seeing in his job as a lawyer with Tenant Resource and Advisory Centre. He said the pattern of landlords trying to circumvent the cap on increasing rent by claiming they, their spouse, child or parent need to dislodge the tenant for at least six months persists.
If this happens, and the tenant can prove to the RTB that their former landlord quickly rented it to someone else, then they are eligible to receive a year’s worth of rent. The number of applications involving a tenant trying to claw back money from a landlord in this instance nearly doubled to 989 last year from 594 in 2021. This year there are nearly 500 of these cases already registered in the first five months.
Mr. Kahlon said that landlords wanting to evict a tenant so they can move in will have to soon use a web portal to generate this notice, which will mean “both landlords and their tenants are educated about their rights and the responsibilities of how to proceed.”