Real Estate Talk Being a Landlord
Contributed by: Jay Lough Hayes, Sales Representative Re/Max Rouge River Realty Ltd. 705-772-1025
People never cease to amaze me. Being 65 means I remember when ‘your word was
your bond’, being on time was important, courtesy, honesty, integrity. I’m not sure we all understand the importance or the meaning of those words but these words made our great country. In our haste to improve the life we give our children, some have missed passing on some of our much needed life skills. I can’t even imagine how many times I have said - “Just because you give a man a hammer, does not mean he knows how to use it”. Fortunately for my sisters and I, our parents were not afraid to ‘get our attention’ when necessary. We learned a lot before going out into the real world. Part, and only part, of buying investment property is choosing the right tenant to occupy that real estate you have saved and worked for. Choosing the wrong tenant makes you lose sleep at night and contemplate our present gun laws. Thanks to our current government system and hiring freeze, Ontario is short approximately 20 adjudicators who sit on the Landlord and Tenant Board assisting landlords to rid their property of those bad tenants and bad landlords. This is a current topic on the minds of every landlord in Ontario. Peterborough is, and has been, experiencing an affordable rental shortage for a few years now. If anyone remembers the five month blip in last years real estate market netting multiple offers on every home put up for sale, this caused investors to perhaps over pay for that investment property. This inflated sale price is, of course, passed on to the tenant, placing yet another home out of the affordable reach for some tenants. That landlord has costs - a mortgage, property taxes, maintenance, insurance and, in some cases, utilities. With the new city by-laws allowing basement apartments, investors must hire a BCIN to approach the city with the investors layout for Page 42
Contractor left end cuts of drywall inside the wall
that extra apartment at a cost of $1,500-$2,000. Then a contractor to complete the work $50,000$75,000, happy to work to the minimum standard set by our government. As I walked a couple into their new basement apartment, we noticed a little water on the floor. The contractor had nicked the city water line hidden in behind the beautiful new wall. When opening up the wall to find this pinhole leak, we discovered the contractor had left all the drywall end cuts in the wall, hidden behind that beautiful paint job. A few more thousand to clean that mess up. That hammer thought again.
