But you are a professional property manager with (possibly) years of experience in this field.
I am referring to a single individual property owner, esp. a retired one like the one in that news article.
The deck is stacked against her (and anyone like her(.
Yes, agreed, from a purely returns % perspective.
But that doesn't include all the hassle, sleepless night, botheration, etc.
How do you attribute or impute the cost of that?
Imagine what this poor landlord is going through.
I have been reading too many of such stories of hapless landlords on the CBO forums.
Maybe I am skeptical.
I disagree the deck is not stacked against her. I have met a landlord that picked her tenants using astrology for crying out loud. Small landlords as a whole can use a whole lot of getting familiar with their OWN business.
You know when you hear these stories there is another side. I see many landlords try to rent stuff that shouldn't be rented, is illegal to rent and who are generally cruising for a bruising.
That is really the reason I started my business. To bring the skills I learned working in rentals, collections and evictions in large buildings to small landlords. What I have found is that I am usually not very successful at getting these landlords to understand what their business is. They don't want to believe me. They want the money the tenants give but don't want to provide a good service.
Currently for rent I have the following houses
Beautiful house - great location - smells of cat really bad I told the landlord to paint the room to get rid of the smell, still not done almost 2 months later, last time I met him there i told him he had to clean the cat feces out.
Nice little house - decent location - original oil fired boiler smells of oil I explained to the owner she needs to change it, she can't afford it even thought I have had the house continuously rented for 5 years or so now.
Beautiful basement apartment - great location - no pets - no smoke - perfect credit over improved and over priced
Three Bedroom apartment - weird and small living room, no pets, no smoke, no kids, no laundry, no parking, perfect credit. I told this lady she needs laundry, people who have no car and who are renting a three bedroom want laundry on site.
I am not a tenant advocate. I work for landlords. I only make money when I rent and if I pick bad tenants I have to kick them out again. Sometimes I refuse to rent places. A lot of landlords call me because they are scared to rent after a bad experience. I invariably see the same things. Poorly maintained dirty properties. Almost every time I go to list a house I have to ask the landlord to clean the house. These are basic things. I tell them a dirty house brings dirty people. Nothing I have learned in over 10 years of renting property has taught me how to convince a clean decent person to move in and spend even one minute cleaning other people's old filth.
So I can't speak to this lady but I can tell you this a review is something very specific at the Landlord and Tenant Board. You review an order for an error of law and rarely does it stop the process of eviction. See even if the tenant applied to review her case she would be evicted before her review was granted. What it sounds like is happening is that her case is being delayed because of maintenance issues. When you have a maintenance issue attached to your arrears case it will be rescheduled many times because such cases are last for the day and usually there is time for only one such case per open courtroom per session. I just did a case like this it took from June and we still have not received the order for eviction. The tenant has left now. This particular house was very mouldy from day 1.
Lawyers as a matter of fact know very little about landlord and tenant law. Paralegals do Landlord & Tenant Board matters, property managers and the landlords themselves. Lawyers not very much. Cases from the board can actually be appealed to the Ontario Supreme Court. Then you need a Lawyer. If you have a tenant who is on Disability or Ontario Works they can get free legal aid and appeal their case but this is very rare.
I once had a case take 9 months. That case the old property manager who was fired but was still working for 2 weeks rented a house to a lady who had a drug problem and was a prostitute on Ontario Works. That case went to Osgoode Hall. I'll never forget our last court date was several days after September 11th she got this biker to come and say she was ministering to the victims of Sept 11th. It got kicked out of court but it took a long time.
The worst tenants are the ones looking for problems so they can back out of paying. Like the ones who rented the mould house. They knew exactly what they were doing. I suppose if I wanted to with what I know about the law I could probably live rent free for a year.
