Fill Your Vacancies

Vacancy rates have gone up in many communities across the province, and landlords have had to deal with this in interesting ways. The easiest way to fill your empty units - with little effort - is to have your existing tenants refer their friends and colleagues. If you have a great building in a fantastic location, your vacancy should rent itself and your tenants should want to refer people they know.

But no matter how amazing your building is, in this market a little incentive can certainly help. Some landlords have incentive referral programs where the person who makes the referral receives something small like a gift card to a nearby coffee shop. Most buildings that have this kind of program have simple rules about what qualifies as a referral; for example, the referred applicant has to actually be accepted and move into the building.

A referral incentive program is not just a great way to fill your vacancies; it is a way to make your apartment building a community that people want to live in and stay in - further reducing your vacancies. Remember to make it fun!

 -- Carly Ludwar and Hunter Boucher

Rent Increase

The cost of living keeps going up and a big factor in that is the cost of maintaining rental units. The cost of the services required to maintain your rental unit are subject to change with very little notice and there is no way of passing your increased cost of doing business to your existing tenants, the only exception being an annual rent increase.

As a landlord you are able to raise your tenants' rent once a year (12 months from the last increase or the date the tenancy began), but as BC has government imposed rent controls, the maximum amount of increase is limited.  The limit is tied in part to the consumer price index, resulting in a maximum increase of 4.3% for any rent increase effective in 2012.  In early September, the government will announce the limit for 2013.

Despite your cost increases, you need to consider the market in your area when deciding whether to increase rents for existing tenants.  Higher vacancy rates give tenants more flexibility to move if they think their rent is too high. 

-- Al Kemp and Hunter Boucher

Which Agreement is the Best?

Why don’t I just use the residential tenancy agreement provided by the “government” (the Residential Tenancy Branch [RTB])?

The RTB’s tenancy agreement is, of course, an acceptable form to use for tenancies in British Columbia. Unfortunately, it is very basic and does not achieve much in the way of protecting the landlord’s interest.

Why would I use the residential tenancy agreement provided by the “landlord association” (the Rental Owners and Managers Society of BC [ROMS BC]) over the RTB’s version?

ROMS BC has been in existence – with five different names – since 1970. In this time, we have gained experience from thousands of members and hundreds of thousands of different situations. Our collective knowledge has allowed us to successfully create our own comprehensive residential tenancy agreement – approved for use by the BC government. Each clause that our agreement contains has been appropriately vetted to ensure enforceability in all levels of the judicial process. To compare the two agreements: RTB’s version has a total of 16 clauses, while the ROMS BC agreement has 43.

If you make your own agreement, why can’t I?

Theoretically, you could make your own agreement however most “homemade” agreements are found to be invalid. What most people don’t know is that there are many, many rules in the law about how you make your agreement – everything from unconscionable material terms to the size of the font, and everything in between. Creating an agreement that is fully enforceable under the Residential Tenancy Act is a time consuming and difficult task – which we have already done for you!

But your agreement does not have some things I want covered in my agreement…

When we created our tenancy agreement we worked very hard to make it apply to every tenancy (whether it be an apartment, basement suite or single-family home), but we recognize that there are always exceptions to the norm. Your tenancy agreement may need some extra clauses that relate very specifically to your rental unit or property, and we are here to help you with those additional terms. Because adding additional terms is just as dangerous as writing your own agreement, we recommend that you write up what you want to see added, and we will work with you to make it fit.

-- Hunter Boucher and Carly Ludwar

Interest Rates on Deposits

As we covered in our series on deposits there is interest on both pet damage deposits and security deposits and it is very easy to figure out how much the interest is using the Residential Tenancy Branch interest calculator on their site. The real question here is how do they figure out the percentage each year?

We have to search in the Residential Tenancy Regulations for this answer. Regulation 4 in part 1 states that the interest paid on deposits is 4.5% below the prime lending rate of the principal banker to the Province on the first day of each calendar year, compounded annually. What does this mean for you? Unless the prime rate exceeds 4.5%, there will continue to be no interest payable on security deposits for tenancies that began after January 1, 2009.


-- Hunter Boucher and Al Kemp

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