a common pattern in Toronto is: - private equity firm/REIT identifies a building with low rents - they borrow a lot of money and buy the building - they buy out or harass existing tenants to leave (ie refusing to fix anything) - as units turn over they renovate and score higher rents
these people’s books would show large financing costs on the assumption they could squeeze the tenants and short of a rental unit registry to enforce rent regulations on a per unit basis not clear to me how to tackle this on a good faith basis
You cannot do this in New York, thanks to the 2019 reforms to our rent laws. If you force out your old tenants, the legal rent for the new tenants will not be any higher. The problem is that a lot of building owners have debts they took out before 2019, in the hopes that they would be able to.
what’s the enforcement mechanism? technically a lot of these moves are also illegal but good luck proving your building was malicious unmaintained. does rent stabilization bind the unit?, ie rents can’t float to market between tenants above a certain price increase?
that's correct. the regulated rent applies to the unit, changes in tenants make no difference. this is a big change from the pre-2019 law.
that’s what we need here / i think how it works in qc? is there a registry i can look up? how do i know a lord ain’t fibbing?
We have a registry but it’s hard to get to. That said, some tenants do the legwork and find their market rent apartment was stabilized and not disclosed, which results in a rent reset and huge penalties for the landlord And landlords do these tricks anyway!
Worth reminding everyone that the median landlord IQ in New York is 20 points lower than everyone else & that the logic of “the fines for this are so big, we shouldn’t risk it” cannot penetrate their thick provincial skulls. Many are third-generation non-working heirs.