B.C. Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon announced Wednesday so-called “landlord use” evictions will now require double the notice time to tenants and require the use of a new online application portal commencing July 18.
"With this new tool, we're taking action to better protect tenants from being evicted under false pretences and ensure that landlords who need to legitimately reclaim their units have a straightforward pathway to do so," said Kahlon.
In essence, if a landlord intends to use their rental home for personal reasons, they will need to generate a notice to evict through the website portal, run by the Residential Tenancy Branch (RTB), instead of simply handing the tenant a notice they have created on their own.
Such evictions occur should landlords wish to move in themselves or have a family member move in to the rental unit. Other instances include a rental apartment requiring the unit for a caretaker or a new homeowner moving in upon sale of the rental unit.
The contention, as Kahlon noted, is how some landlords evict tenants under the guise of landlord use, only to rent out the unit again at a significantly higher rent.
Under the old rules, a landlord needed to provide two months’ notice and was required to occupy the unit (according to the legal, stated intentions) for at least six months. Now, four months of notice is required and the unit must be occupied for 12 months. Tenants also now have 30 days to dispute the eviction as opposed to 15 days.
"The portal will also provide government with a window to better understand when and how often these evictions occur so that we can continue to build on our work to improve services for renters and landlords," said Kahlon.
The website portal system has the support of both Amanda Burrows, executive director at First United, a community provider for Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, and David Hutniak, CEO at LandlordBC, per statements issued via Kahlon’s news release.
While using the website portal, landlords will be given information about the required conditions for ending a tenancy and the penalty associated with evicting in bad faith, which is equivalent to 12 monthly rent payments.
New system stops short of capturing province's problematic rental system: researcher
However, University of B.C. housing researcher Alina McKay says that while the website portal is a good start, it does not go far enough in capturing all evictions and could even result in landlords evicting tenants for other reasons, so as to avoid the website portal.
“The registry, from our perspective, is just best practices for actually having evictions being processed and having an administrative record of all evictions that are happening,” McKay told Glacier Media in an interview.
But as McKay wrote on the Housing Research Collaborative blog, the website portal “doesn’t go far enough: if the province is serious about protecting tenants against bad-faith evictions, legislation should be introduced that ensures that all notices to end tenancy are first filed with the RTB.”
McKay’s work focuses on understanding the exact nature of evictions, which can be under-reported up to five-fold across the country.
The research from surveys and an examination of documented disputes indicates B.C. has the highest eviction rate in the country with 10.5 per cent of renter households having reported being forced to move between April 2016 to early 2021, compared to 5.9 per cent nationally.
So, McKay states, “by not tracking other forms of evictions there is no way to tell if this will simply incentivize landlords to evict for reasons that do not require formal filing.”
McKay asserts this is what happened when the B.C. government clamped down on evictions due to renovations, or so-called “renovictions.”
Once the government started requiring proof of renovation permits, in July 2021, disputes of such notices at the RTB dropped precipitously.
“Analysis of RTB data from July of 2021 to May 26, 2022 shows that only three of these applications were disputed during this time in the Metro Vancouver area, which likely reflects limited uptake of the new reporting processes,” McKay states on the blog.
McKay also asserts that “without the requirement to formally file for all eviction types, the burden is shifted to the tenant to understand when they should be served an official notice.
And, McKay stated, “by not requiring landlords to apply for an order of possession for any form of eviction, the province also misses out on being able to properly monitor eviction filings and create evidence-based legislation.”
Housing activist Kahlil Ashanti also told Glacier Media the website portal should include all eviction notices.
Ashanti, who was evicted in bad faith, also suggests for the RTB to be in receipt of digital copies of all rental agreements.
Ashanti’s chief beef with oversight of the rental market is that once disputes reach a monetary penalty there is limited means to collect money. Even recent efforts to make monetary judgments available through a registry come up short in effectively reducing the burden on the applicant, he said.
