Hydro Tip

There are often gaps in time between the end of one tenancy and the beginning of another.    Or tenants may decide to leave early and contact BC Hydro to close their account. The property owner then gets a surprise invoice for the period of vacancy that often can be corrected, but it takes time and effort and the ability to connect with the right person at BC Hydro.

One of our property management members arranges to set up Hydro, water and cable accounts on behalf of new tenants. He has the appropriate forms and gets the tenants to sign them, ensuring the accounts are established at the right time. With the BC Hydro application, he also includes the meter reading at the time the application is submitted. If there is a significant gap between that reading and the last reading (or estimate) in Hydro’s files, the company avoids being charged for the usage that should have been paid by the previous tenants.

-- Carly Ludwar

Short Cuts?

Landlords, like everyone else, are on the look out for the most efficient way to deal with their affairs. And in a perfect world, all of our shortcuts would lead directly to our destination. However, we don’t live in a perfect world, so sometimes it is necessary to do extra work to avoid what could turn into a disaster.

When renting out a building - usually a house or multiplex - that has more than one unit where utilities are not included, it would seem efficient to have one of the tenants put the utilities in their own name, and have them collect a share from the other tenants in the building. This would mean you would only have to deal with collecting the rent and no other money each month. This sounds great, but it opens you up for many other issues.

One potential disaster is that the utilities do not get paid by the tenant who is responsible for them, though the other tenants have been paying their share to the tenant who should be paying the bill. The end result is the utilities being cut off - and the tenants who paid their bills on time coming after you.

Or the opposite; the tenant who is responsible for utilities pays the full bill, but the other tenants decide that they’d rather not pay. Again, the tenant who paid the full amount of the utilities - or could only pay part of them seeing as s/he didn’t have enough money - will be looking to you to fix the issue.

The warning to heed? Unless the utilities are billed for one specific unit only, do not require any of your tenants to have the utility bills in their own name.

-- Hunter Boucher and Carly Ludwar