The city of Toronto introduced new by-laws yesterday for apartment buildings where apartment buildings with more than 10 units will be required to be registered and licensed with the city of Toronto.  Here are the main details of the by-law for your review:

• Yearly registration of rental buildings with 3 or more storey and 10 or more units
• Annual registration includes details regarding building owner and manager as well as their contact information
• Annual registration fee of $10.60 per unit
• Each Building must have tenant request process
• Urgent requests require a response within 24 hours
• Non-urgent requests require a response within 7 days
• Pest Management Program and details are required
• New set of “administrative cost recovery’ fees including a flat fee of $1800 if a full building audit is required.

While this is just another cash grab for the city, there are some good services that will help neighbors get rid of absent landlords and slumlord too.  I don’t like the fact that this is all going to cost the owners more money as the city is downloading all their responsibility onto the owner and tenants.

What the politician writing these laws are failing to realize that the deterioration of our rental assets is in part because we don’t have enough units available to be rented.  The units that are in good condition are also in higher demand and some owners just can’t justify spending extra money due to the rents that are being collected.  Further, there haven’t been many new buildings added to our rental pool causing lower than 1% vacancy in the city and having schemes such as these implemented allow the politicians to pander to the tenant base for votes.

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