Living in an apartment can have a lot of great advantages, but only if the landlord is a reasonable person (or company).
What would you do if your landlord suddenly got very strict with the payment due dates and also stopped performing routine maintenance?
That is what happened to the tenant in this story, so when he finally went to court, he presented all his evidence and walked away with months of free rent.
Check it out.
We’ll start off by noting that I spent about 2 decades working in security.
During that time I worked many different types of security in many different locations.
The one that matters for this story was time spent in the Rental Housing Tribunal in a major city, as a kind of baliff.
For those not knowing what that is, think a courtroom (in a major city anyway, in a smaller town it’ll probably be an event room in a hotel or community center) as you’d see on tv but with less formality and an adjudicator instead of a judge.
They functionally are the same thing to landlords and tenants, but they definitely aren’t the same thing.
This place exclusively deals with landlord and tenant disputes, and is the only place to resolve landlord and tenant disputes.
Note that I wasn’t a bailiff, and it wasn’t a court, but these terms mostly accurately describe the situation and my place in it.
For 2 years I worked at the Rental Housing Tribunal, it was early in my time in security I was 18-20ish.
Being as it was a major city, the sheer number of cases I sat through was beyond my ability to count.
I saw everything there was to see.
No one is capable of surprising me with a story because I’ve seen them all.
In detail, as a side duty of mine was to ensure all parties had copies of all evidence being presented.
I did a lot of photocopying, and always read/inspected everything I copied to ensure nothing got cut off or made illegible.
Valuable knowledge.
By the time I stopped working there I probably knew the way everything worked well enough to be an adjudicator myself.
Well no obviously not, but I’m certainly in no need of a lawyer either should I ever have need to go there.
I also had intimate knowledge of how the system worked beyond the actual rules.
Like, for example, adjudicators would always give a little leeway to anyone representing themselves over someone who had a lawyer.
Or how upset adjudicators would get when a party was speaking out of turn.
Seriously do not do that.
Skip forward almost a decade.
I left the city and am in a fairly large town in the same Province (same tenant laws).
I have a few roommates in a decently sized townhouse.
We get along well. But there’s a problem.
Only I can write cheques, and our paydays don’t line up.
So I’m the one who pays the rent, and I usually can’t do it on the 1st because roommates don’t usually all pay in time.
We advise the landlord we might be a day or two late but we’ll always have it by the 3rd at the latest.
They have no problem with it at all, I spoke to them myself.
For about a year this works fine.
No complaints from landlord because even if we’re often a day or 2 late, we always pay.
We’re also fairly quiet and don’t damage the property. Nearly model tenants.
I do not actually have any idea why, but one day this changed.
I suspect a different person in the company started overseeing the region.
That is weird.
One day, suddenly we got a summons to the Rental Housing Tribunal (hereafter to be referred to as RHT) on the 2nd of the month for failure to pay rent.
This doesn’t actually lead to a case because we paid the same day.
But now we have to pay the application fee the landlord paid in order to serve the summons.
I complained to the neighbor who was also the superintendent and eventually heard back that their contact at the company was now demanding 1st of the month no exceptions.
Why not figure out a way to pay early? What a waste of money.
Well that really didn’t work for us, so we probably had to pay that fee 15-20 times over the next 2 years.
I could have gone to tribunal over it but we were technically without a leg to stand on and I knew it.
Maybe if I went enough times I can ding them for harassment but I don’t have time for that and my roommates don’t care.
After being split between us all the fee wasn’t enough deterrent to change our behavior so we accepted it.
If this was the only issue, there wouldn’t be much story though.
They definitely got a new management company.
At around the same time the rent leeway vanished, so did mandatory maintenance.
I’m not going to list everything that went wrong and wasn’t fixed. You’ll get a decent idea at the end.
We suffered through it.
We were all working too many hours at bad pay to be able to actually do anything about it.
We adapted.
But after about 2 years it broke.
Everyone but me up and moved out for various reasons within a 4 month period.
I’m not going into any details on my roommates at all because things kind of exploded for a couple different reasons outside of this.
No reason to dig any of that up.
I had been saving up awhile and was able to quit my job without having to immediately get another so I suddenly had a lot of time.
I didn’t want to stay and pay the rent by myself or have to find new roommates I could live with, and with my experience in the RHT I knew I had the landlord by the balls.
So I went for them.
I stopped paying rent.
Annoyingly I didn’t get a summons the 1st month.
But I did the 2nd.
He is going to come prepared.
So I went with a meticulously documented plethora of evidence of failure to maintain the property and entering the property without formal notice.
I had a copy for the landlord and a copy for the adjudicator.
I know from experience that technically you’re supposed to give the other party the evidence before the tribunal, but I also knew about that leeway an adjudicator gives to those who represent themselves.
So, I didn’t give the landlord the evidence until our case came up, 100% total ambush.
They argued they were ambushed, but the adjudicator just dismissed the case, dressed me down a little, and told me to file my own summons as I should have done.
This was the petty revenge. The landlord and lawyer drove 3 hours to get there, for nothing. Worse than nothing.
I filed my own summons, and the big day shows up.
It’s been about 4 months of me not paying rent at this point.
I’m prepared to pay if I lose, but I don’t think I’m going to lose.
The whole thing could not have gone better.
I had 20-30 pages of evidence and 20 odd photographs, they had nothing.
They had no actual defence for our water heater being out for 6 months or us not having a fridge for a year, just to mention 2 severe issues.
Their entire defense rested on us being late for rent, which actually worked against them once that led to the adjudicator learning how many times we’d paid the application fee, and lies that had no evidence to support them.
This landlord should know better.
They even talked over me a few times, and I SAW IN HIS EYES the one time I opened my mouth to protest during their turn to speak but forced myself to shut up with every gram of willpower I had so only a squeak came out, the adjudicator respected me.
He had no respect for the landlord.
I had won on every possible front. The only question was how much.
It was more than I’d ever seen.
I got 9 months of free rent, and the landlord was ordered to have everything fixed before the next month was over or I’d get more.
I gave notice I was leaving at the end of the 8th month and left at the end of the 9th.
Because the landlord had never renewed the lease I didn’t have to give him the 3 month notice the lease specified.
That is a pretty big win.
If you want a figure to put to it, I basically got a $13,000 judgement in my favor, adjusted for inflation and rounded.
I also made the landlord and lawyer drive 3 hours, twice, only to lose.
The landlords face was so red at the end I thought he’d have a heart attack.
Landlords really need to do their jobs if they expect tenants to pay their rent.
Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say.
This person says tenants in America have no rights.
Good landlords are a blessing.
Hopefully this landlord learned his lesson.
These are two critical appliances.
This is kind of weird.
Finally a nice win for the tenants.
We love to see it.
If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.
