Trevor Jenkinson, President of the West Kootenay Landlord Society, says new provincial changes to better protect renters from bad faith evictions shouldn’t impact the region’s rental market, but it’s not all without concern.
This comes after the BC Government announced plans to launch the Residential Tenancy Branch Landlord Use Web Portal on July 18 to protect tenants by requiring landlords to give notice to end tenancy for either personal occupancy or caretaker use.
For the landlords in the West Kootenays, the portal won’t significantly impact business, according to Jenkinson, who says evictions for personal occupancy rarely happen in this region.
“I’m not really hearing any concerns about the existence of the portal. It is reasonably rare that the landlord needs to move into their rental unit.” said Jenkinson.
“There are some people who move to town, buy a house, and aren’t ready to move to town yet, so they rent it out in the interim until they finish their retirement and so forth. Those scenarios happen, but they’re not really all that frequent.”
In addition to the portal, the BC Government has also increased the eviction notice requirements for personal use from two months to four, which does spark some concerns for Jenkinson.
He says originally, the Landlord Use Web Portal was supposed to be for existing landlords wanting to move into their own properties. However, he was surprised to find out it would also include properties listed for sale.
“That’s going to create some issues with sales of properties and people wanting to move into the area and move into a house because now it’s a four-month notice that they have to get instead of a two-month notice. That could create issues with financing and other aspects of the real estate transaction.”
While the recent changes may have minimal impact on the rental market in this region, Jenkinson said there have been several other changes to the Residential Tenancy Act that have had a negative impact, and he thinks it’s time the province rewrites it.
“It’s become very unbalanced. When you have a housing crisis, you don’t want to put off those that are actually supplying the housing in the first place, especially those who are providing affordable housing, and those are the small mom-and-pop landlords,” he said.
“All the changes that have been made to the legislation in the last seven years have all been to protect tenants, and they’re protecting tenants from those few bad landlords that are out there, unfortunately. But the thing is, if you pass new laws to try and defeat the bad ones, the good faith landlords end up paying the price for that.”
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