Tenants in Montreal and elsewhere in Quebec are taking advantage of the housing crisis to illegally sublet their apartments on short-term rental platforms like Airbnb, which disturbs the peace of neighbors and causes a lot of headaches for owners who have to turn to the Administrative Housing Tribunal (TAL) to stop these illegal practices.
“It’s quite incredible that a tenant makes a profit on an investment for which he does not spend money and does not pay a mortgage at the end of each month,” says the chairman of the board of directors of the Corporation. of real estate owners of Quebec (CORPIQ), Éric Sansoucy, who sees this as a “financial injustice”.
In 2022, CORPIQ had also assessed at the end of a survey carried out among its members that nearly 5% of them had already been faced with tenants who unknowingly sublet their accommodation in the short term. , thus changing the purpose of the premises, which contravenes the legislation in force (see box).
Since January 2023, several owners have also obtained a judgment from the TAL which orders the termination of the lease of tenants who were subletting short-term without their knowledge, noted The duty by examining around twenty legal decisions handed down during this period.
A question of security
This is how the real estate company InterRent won its case at the beginning of the month against tenant Gorji Yasaman, who had signed a lease in 2017 for accommodation located in a building on rue Saint-Mathieu, in Montreal.
The owner of the premises initiated an appeal against this tenant in the summer of 2022 after realizing that she does not really live in the accommodation, but rather in France, where she teaches at a university. The accommodation would instead have been rented full-time on the Airbnb platform without the owner’s authorization.
“We could not identify the people in the accommodation, so really, security for the other tenants is a problem. But also, it changes the destination of the property”, since this accommodation has a residential vocation, explains to Duty the lawyer of the real estate group at the origin of this legal action, Mélanie Zawahiri. The company thus obtained from the TAL the termination of the tenant’s lease, which did not contest this decision.
Overcrowded housing
Owner Panagiotis Tsagarelis, for his part, was dismayed to find that the two-bedroom unit he had rented in 2022 to Mohammed Riyazuddin in the Parc-Extension district has since been repeatedly sublet to numerous “workers”. foreigners”, as well as “travelers” who came to stay temporarily in this overcrowded and unsanitary apartment. The real tenant of the premises never lived in the accommodation, according to the owner’s testimony before the TAL.
“In this unit, the tenant does not live in the accommodation. He lives in Ontario. But there are sometimes four, five, even six people who occupy a little four and a half,” underlines Panagiotis Tsagarelis in an interview with Duty. “We can only conclude that the tenant benefits from the accommodation to do something commercial with it,” continues the owner, who obtained from the TAL a termination of the lease and the eviction of all the occupants of this accommodation on a date which does not has not yet been determined.
Moreover, in her decision, the administrative judge Marilyne Trudeau did not fail to emphasize that the TAL has been “regularly referred”, in recent years, to “disputes between a landlord and a tenant when the accommodation is used for tourist or short-term rental. However, such practices contribute to “the precariousness of existing affordable housing as we know it in Quebec,” maintains Éric Sansoucy of CORPIQ.
A business model
Behind the tenants who rent accommodation for profit in this way are sometimes hidden companies responsible for orchestrating their subletting. This is how in December 2021, the real estate giant Hazelview obtained the termination of the lease of accommodation rented by Seyededris Galishoorani, the president of the company Golden Castle Group, specializing in short-term rentals.
After receiving several complaints from neighbors regarding the noise emanating from this accommodation, Hazelview noted that it had been rented for several years on “residential rental platforms such as Airbnb”, which contravened the conditions of the lease. The latter has since been terminated, but Golden Castle Group’s business model continues to lead, in several buildings in the metropolis, to the withdrawal of housing from the traditional rental market.
However, “it is the tenants who directly suffer from the removal of housing to turn it into tourist rentals,” recalls the spokesperson for the Regroupement des committees logement et associations de tenants du Québec, Martin Blanchard, who urges the Legault government to punish more severely illegal tourist rental.