I am an academic and during the summer I often go overseas to conduct research. I also own my own home—a spacious one-bedroom condo close to downtown Toronto. The mortgage, condo fees, electricity, and taxes total about $1700 per month, and during past summers I have rented it to persons seeking short-term rentals. In the summer of 2019 I experienced a nightmare for two reasons: an irresponsible tenant and, more importantly, the tenant was protected by Ontario’s Residential Tenancies Act (RTA).
Before departing overseas, I advertised my place on Kijiji as four-month rental, from May 1st to Sept 1st. I received many queries and found someone who seemed to be responsible and who appeared to have a successful consulting business. We signed the agreement, and I jetted to Paris. On July 1st, I did not receive payment in accordance with our agreement, and the tenant’s excuse was not having access to funds at their bank. They promised to pay on the July 5th, and did not, and promised to pay again on the 8th and did not. At this point, I realized that they were dishonest and did not keep their promises, and so I asked the tenant to leave. They responded saying that they had a right to stay. Really? If a tenant in your home persistently lied and violated the terms of a written agreement, they could no longer stay, right?
Wrong. After consulting a lawyer, I discovered that, in the eyes of the RTA, when I went to Europe I moved out of my home, and the tenant moved in, giving them all the rights inscribed in the legislation, while I was considered a landlord. In practice, this meant that they could stay despite not paying, and if the rent was paid, the tenant could stay indefinitely. To receive the rent I was owed, I would have to submit an N4, but to have the legal certainty that I could return home, I would also have to submit an N12, which is the procedure landlords use when they want their property for personal use. This was the case even though I just went to Europe temporarily to conduct research; I did not move out, and never intended to.
My lawyer told me that an alternative to an N12 was to pay the tenant to sign an N11, a document which confirms their consent to terminating the tenancy on Sept 1st—that is, the date we had already agreed to. The tenant owed me two months rent, or $3400, and, in utter desperation, I offered to forgive that debt in exchange for signing the N11, which was accepted. And so happily I returned home Sept 1st, but at a pretty exorbitant cost: two months of forgone rent, lawyer fees and the cost of returning to Toronto from Europe earlier than planned in order to deal with the mess. And this is on top of the anguish and stress of the ordeal.
Had the RTA not been applied to cases like mine, the problem would have been quickly solved: when they refused to leave I could have called the police, and my losses would have only been the forgone rent. But because of the RTA, I could not do this, and, even worse, I did not have legal certainty that I could return home on the date we agreed; consequently, I had to essentially bribe the tenant to respect the original commitment. Had they refused, I would have had to proceed with an N12, which would have been a lie because I would be pretending that I needed the property for personal use, when, in fact, it was my home; and the N12 could take several months, meaning, had I taken this route, I would have returned home in October or November, in the middle of the semester, when the last thing I need is to deal with the legal complications of the Landlord Tenant Board.
Hopefully, members of Ontario's provincial parliament will consider amending the RTA so that others do not have my experience. In the meantime, people in Ontario should think twice before temporarily renting out their homes while they are away.
