Editor:
Imagine you are the owner of a small family-run business. But your business will never see any growth in its profit margin. You will have to conduct business with bad customers who may ruin your life savings.
This business requires a huge capital investment, but it will produce a dismal rate of return.
Are you still in?
This is the type of business environment that our landlords are facing in the Lower Mainland. In B.C., we have legislation that caps our rent increase to inflation. The eviction process for problem tenants take so long and (is) so costly that it would make any sensible business person to walk away.
With the high cost of real estate nowadays, it just doesn’t make any sense to get into the rental business.
Every month, I would hear a story from the media about high rents or renovictions. Our politicians would jump in and promise to tighten the legislation to further protect the tenants from the greedy landlords.
This type of legislation may score a few political points for the politician, but it doesn’t provide any real solution to the problem. If our real problem is a lack of affordable housing in the Lower Mainland, we should build more affordable housing.
Trying to address the problem with unfair legislation to lower rents or force landlords to keep troubled tenants is simply shifting the cost of the issue to the homeowners. But this is obviously the more favourable course of action for our politicians as legislations are free (at least free to the government) but affordable housing costs money.
Under this kind of condition, no wonder we have more and more homeowners taking their units off the rental market or converting to Airbnb every year. I personally know a lot of people who would rather have their basement units sit empty than to subject themselves to the heartaches of potentially dealing with problem tenants. And this situation will never change until we have a fair and balanced tenancy act.
In my opinion, the single-biggest problem that keeps homeowners away from the rental market is the eviction procedure. Everyone knows someone with a problem-tenant experience that dragged on for months.
These experiences can often cost tens of thousands of dollars by the time they account for all the lost rent, building repairs and eviction costs – on top of all the mental stress and lost time to fight the case through the Residential Tenancy Branch.
If we have a more balanced legislation that protects our homeowners from the problem tenants, perhaps there will be a lot more people willing to put their units on the market for rent.
Yes, we have a rental housing crisis in the Lower Mainland, but it is a crisis propelled by unfair legislation that took away all homeowners’ incentive to stay in the market.
Jamie Ong, Burnaby
