Renters Bill of Rights Announcement - Part 2

Let’s talk about the challenges from a Manitoba perspective.

Skyrocketing rents:  
Here in Manitoba, Landlords increase the rents by the amounts set rent increase guidelines each year.  There are exceptions, but for the most part most of the private landlords should be following the set rent increases. This protects the tenants from huge increases.

However, people have already forgotten that during covid landlords were not allowed to increase the rents. While everything else was going up Landlords were not able to raise rents to keep up with all the other soring costs.

Not only were landlords not able to increase rents, landlords could not evict people during covid. This allowed tenants to live rent free and there was nothing that could be done.

Like other businesses that were struggling during covid so where the landlords.

Where was the government’s help for the Landlords when their bills – mortgages, insurance, property taxes, utilities etc  - still needed to be paid ? And the tenants were living there rent free.

There was NONE!

And if you were lucky there was minimal damage to the unit after the tenant left.
 
Renovictions:

Landlords are allowed to ask the tenants to move out if major renovations are being done to the unit. The guideline were set out in the residential tenancies act.

Now there can be an issue when the landlord uses this as an excuse to evict the tenant. However, if you follow the RTB process to evict someone it can takes months to get someone out.  So a landlord could already be loosing rent and to have to go another couple of months without payment while they try to get the tenant out of the unit.

But on the flip side there are tenants that will leave by the dates indicated

Tenants want improved rental units – how are landlords suppose to complete this with a tenant living in a unit?

Stay tuned for Part 3 where we'll continue to discuss the challenges.