Intimidation, threats, recourse to the courts: the obstacles are varied for many tenants who find themselves facing landlords reluctant to grant their lease transfer request, in the context of soaring prices in the real estate market.
Franck Ollivier, a 29-year-old young man, carried out a real obstacle course in order to be able to give up his lease this fall in anticipation of his return to France, his country of origin. The owner of his apartment in Ville-Marie, a real estate group present in several boroughs of Montreal, first said that he had already re-let it to another tenant in anticipation of Mr. Ollivier’s departure. The real estate group therefore refused its request to transfer the lease.
However, it is within the rights of tenants, under the Civil Code of Quebec, to assign their lease so that the next occupant of the accommodation benefits, when moving in, the same rent as the one who leaves this apartment. This process is moreover well supervised, and an owner can refuse an assignment of lease only if he has “serious” reasons to oppose the proposed assignee, in particular if the latter has a history of non-payment of the lease. rent or if the credit investigation on that person was inconclusive.
After learning about his lease assignment rights on various groups on social media, Mr. Ollivier received written threats of a libel lawsuit from the landlord, which The duty was able to consult, and felt “spied on” by it. This caused him a lot of “stress”, according to what the young man said before the Administrative Court of Housing (TAL), where his case was transferred last July.
” [Le représentant du propriétaire] tracked me on Facebook, he contacted me by e-mail, he drove me crazy ”, recently confided Mr. Ollivier to the Duty.
The TAL finally validated the lease transfer at the beginning of September, after concluding that the real estate group had no serious reasons for refusing it. Franck Ollivier also received financial compensation of $ 500 for the inconveniences he suffered, in addition to a reimbursement of his legal costs. “Basically, I had everything,” says Mr. Ollivier, who hopes that this judgment will help show owners that they “cannot go that far”.
The real estate group in question did not respond to interview requests from the Duty.
Housing crisis
This is not, moreover, an anecdotal case. This year, the lawyer and lecturer in housing law at the University of Quebec in Montreal Daniel Crespo Villarreal noticed a “significant” increase in solicitations within his law firm from tenants whose landlord “Refuses the assignment of lease”. A situation that is not unrelated, according to him, to the significant gap that exists between the rent of currently vacant housing and those that have been occupied for years, as illustrated by a survey by Duty last April.
For a landlord, “it is the chance to put the housing at the price observed on the market” by terminating the lease rather than letting a tenant assign it to another for the same rent, analyzes Mr. Crespo Villarreal.
Over the past few months, numerous judgments have been rendered by the TAL in connection with requests for the assignment of the lease. Several Montreal tenants have also entrusted the Duty in the last few days, having had many difficulties in giving up their lease, coming up against the silence of their owner, the latter preferring an outright termination of the lease.
“It’s a bit of an obstacle course,” says Gabriel Carpentier, who went to the TAL with his wife to successfully sell the lease for the rental accommodation they occupied in the Plateau-Mont-Royal borough. . Before the court proceedings, the owners tried to justify their desire to terminate the lease by arguing that an assignment “has no reason to exist”, since the tenants in question “have acquired a property”. Reasons deemed “unjustified” by the TAL, which instead validated this lease assignment in a decision rendered at the end of November.
“I have the impression that the owners want to make their building profitable, especially the new buyers”, also notes the lawyer Alexandre B. Romano, who represents most of the tenants of the Manoir Lafontaine, threatened with eviction in the borough of Plateau-Mont-Royal. They then seek “by all means to get rid of their tenants.”
“It is really worrying, because the owners have the big end of the stick in the business of lease transfers”, notes the spokesperson for the Regroupement des committees housing et associations de tenants du Québec, Maxime Roy-Allard, who sees lease assignment as a tool to keep rental housing affordable.
Data provided by the TAL to Duty show moreover that the requests before this court so that it decides on the right to the assignment of lease or to sublet have been increasing for several years, after an almost uninterrupted decrease since 2009. There are 66 of them for the period 2020-2021, compared to 30 two years earlier.
” A mean of pression “
However, the initial objective of the legalization of this process was simply to offer “a way out” to tenants who had to vacate their accommodation before the end of their lease, argues the director of operations of the Corporation of the real estate owners of the. Quebec, Kevin Buche.
Over time, the assignment of lease has “transformed” into a “pressure tactic” for tenants who want to “ensure rent control” of their housing, he observes. However, by its strict framework, the assignment of lease has the effect of harming the owner who would like to take advantage of the departure of a tenant to “renovate his home or offer it to a member of his family,” said Mr. Buche. The latter therefore calls for a return to “the basis of the law” with regard to lease assignments, which could reduce the “frustration” of owners.