Admiral Beez
Superstar
Yes, but your like it or lump it attitude is keeping property owners and investors from getting into or staying in the residential rental business.
We have a shortage of rental housing in Toronto, so why not incentive people to get in and stay in the landlord business? It's not rocket science, just ask landlords what they want. For starters, an easy eviction process for cause, such as damage to the property, subletting, commercial use, abuse of utilities, smoking, other lease violations and of course non-payment of rent. As it stands now, you can't evict anyone in the winter. Allow damage deposits and perhaps key money (standard in Japan, for example) payments to weed out the unsavory tenants. As it stands now, the system is broken for landlords, https://www.tvo.org/article/is-the-deck-stacked-against-small-landlords including free legal aid for tenants, but nothing for landlords.
On the flipside, rent increases and the mysterious evictions due to renovations and claims of owner use should be more controlled. In my book, the old story of my sister is moving in, so you need to leave, need to be aggressively investigated, and if it's determined that the landlord simply wanted to flip and avoid capital gains tax or to replace the tenant with a higher paying one, that needs to be a criminal fraud charge.
That said, many landlords I know who've got crappy tenants failed to use the tools already at their disposal; such as employer and income checks, reference checks and other due diligence. Whenever I read about one of these scofflaw tenants that skip from property to property I ask myself, did no one ask to speak with the last landlord or require a credit check? The best tenants I've heard of are those my landlord friends knew already, so were never advertised on the rental market, but that can always go sideways so the income, references and past landlord checks are still essential.
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