When Metro Vancouver homes are listed for both rent and sale: What renters need to know

Metro Vancouver is an infamously difficult market for renters, with a rental vacancy rate hovering around one per cent.

When you google addresses of homes offered for rent, many seemingly turn up active on real estate listings. Given the drop in home sales as of late, this doesn’t come as a shock to Robert Patterson with the Tenant Resource and Advisory Centre.

“Certainly in the current housing landscape, it makes sense where people are looking to move investment properties [and] may want to have tenants occupy them. Or it might even look attractive to some people buying a property to have tenants there already, if the intention is to hold the property for income.”

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Listing a home for rent and sale at the same time is perfectly allowed. However, Patterson says renters should know their rights.

“Generally speaking, whether or not a property is for sale or sold, tenants rights remain unchanged. They have the same rights that any tenant does under the Residential Tenancy Act,” he said.

That includes terms of your lease, in that your tenancy agreement can’t be ended by a new owner until the end of that term. But once that agreement ends and you are renting month-to-month — as is commonly the case — it’s important for tenants to know they can be given notice to move.

“If someone buys a property and instructs the landlord in writing to issue a notice to end tenancy because that purchaser wants to move in, then that’s one way a tenancy can end that it might not otherwise be likely to end if the property is not on the market,” Patterson said.

“The earliest date the tenancy [can end] will be the last day of that fixed term, as long as there’s at least two months notice.”

Patterson adds people who are considering renting a home that is listed for sale should carefully consider whether they are okay with a month-to-month tenancy — and to be absolutely clear about it in the rental agreement.

“If it’s a month-to-month tenancy, that’s a much more volatile situation where pretty much at any time the property sells, that tenant might be subject to a purchaser’s two-month notice for use,” he said.

“Another thing would be also to look carefully through a tenancy agreement to see if there’s any additional terms about the sale of the property that had been added.”

He says he’s seen landlords add extra terms in an attempt to limit a tenant’s rights.

“The vast majority of cases, those are generally unenforceable because you can’t contract out of the rules set out in the Residential Tenancy Act. But at the same time, it’s good to have an idea of what all the parties’ expectations are. So you can see where there might be potential points of conflict or pressure in the future.”

A purchaser or landlord can only give notice for their use of property if they, their parent, spouse, or child — or the parent or child of their spouse — will be moving in. Two months’ notice is required.

“No brothers, no sisters, no aunts or uncles. It’s very narrowly defined,” Patterson said.

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Given the low rental vacancy rate and a cap on allowable rent increases every year, he says some tenants may be skeptical about a landlord’s declaration that the home will be for their use or their close family member’s use.

“Deciding whether or not to move out in accordance with that notice or to try and contest it can be a complex question. For many tenants, it’s hard to know whether someone really intends to move into the property … because you often won’t even know the name or the current address of the person proclaiming to move in.”

He adds it couldn’t hurt to seek legal information and advice in that situation.

The sale of the home also must be completed before a notice for purchaser’s use can be issued.

“Go online, see if you can find the listing, see if you can confirm this sale has actually happened. Or ask the landlord for a copy of the sale documents, just to confirm that that’s actually going through,” Patterson advised, adding he’s seen cases where tenants have moved out only to later learn the property hadn’t actually been sold.

He also suggests you make sure the correct form from the Residential Tenancy Branch is used to give notice.

“That’s for two reasons: First, if it’s not in the correct form, it’s almost certainly not valid. So they it’s not legally enforceable. But second, if it isn’t on the right form, and they move out anyways, they may not be entitled to the compensation that they would have been entitled to, had they got it on the correct form.”