How B.C.’s new housing legislation helps owners of empty suites

As the provincial government looks to end the strict strata rental restrictions, one local homeowner says this is going to have a significant impact on people stuck in his situation.

Shane Woodford is originally from Vancouver. He and his wife have owned their place in New Westminster for years. While they lived in Kamloops, their building allowed them to rent it out — one of a few that could.

He says for three years they were allotted that rental exemption, had a great tenant, and zero issues.

Woodford and his family moved to Faaborg, Denmark, and shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, he says their strata reached out.

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“We got a note from the strata, basically saying, ‘Listen, we’re not going to renew your rental exemption that allows us to rent your apartment out. We just feel like if we do it for you, we got to do it for everybody else,’ and so they didn’t allow us to rent anymore. So, we literally had to tell a really great tenant, who didn’t want to leave, and we didn’t want him to leave, that this had to come to an end, and he had to move out of the apartment.”

With the tenant being forced out and Woodford still overseas, the suite has remained empty since 2020.

“It’s been a pain in the butt because we’re pretty socially conscious people. We cut him a sweet deal on rent because we wanted to have a great renter, we wanted to be able to give him a place to live, and… at the time, we were very aware of the housing crisis, and we didn’t want an empty apartment but were totally handcuffed because strata simply won’t allow us to rent.”

He says it’s been a frustrating experience and he explains why they don’t just sell it as, he points out, they have no immediate plans to move back to Canada.

“We came to Denmark with a two-year plan and so we wanted a place to have when we land when we come back to Canada and then our situation has obviously gotten longer but then you find yourself in that catch-22. We could sell it, yeah, that would be a bundle of money that would be really cool to have, but the converse part of that is for whatever reason, in six months or a year, we say, ‘OK, we’re coming back to Canada,’ then we’ve sold this place, then how do you buy back into this insanely expensive market?”

Woodford admits they feel guilt that it is sitting empty but with the incoming changes, he says this will make a difference.

“It would be a significant upgrade for us to be able to say, ‘OK, now we can rent it out. Now we can do something with it.’ We don’t feel like we’re hanging on to this empty place that somebody should be living in.”

His plan is to get in touch with his strata council as soon as possible.

“How we’re going to do it going forward? We’re going to have to spend some time discussing that, whether it’s a property manager situation or whatever. Dealing it with it so far from home is going to be challenging.”

Possible fallout

The Condominium Home Owners Association of B.C. feels the changes, which are set to be in place by this week, are going to change the dynamics of strata communities.

CHOA Executive Director, Tony Gioventu, says this makes things tricky for strata [councils] to enforce new rules.

“Of the 34,000 strata corporations in B.C., 22,000 of them are 50 units or less. They’re self-managed. There are volunteers. Most of them permit a few rentals to allow for flexibility. There are family rentals… but that’s easily manageable within these communities. The difficulty of removing rental bylaws is suddenly we’re going to be asking volunteers to be dealing on a much higher level with the complexity of rentals and the transiency of residents in buildings. I think that’s going to be a significant problem for strata councils.”

He stresses more tenants are good but dealing with a problem renter may prove difficult.

“Neither the Strata Property Act or the Residential Tenancy Act really enable the strata corporation to come into the system to evict a problem tenant because neither piece of legislation recognizes the strata corporation as a part of a legal interest in that relationship. A simple policy statement from Residential Tenancy saying they’re going to deal with strata evictions will probably get challenged quite quickly.”

He doesn’t see foresee any legal challenges once the changes kick in.

“There isn’t really potential for a legal challenge when provincial government changes a statute specifically around properties.”

Gioventu does warn of a serious consequences when this goes through.

“If you have a property that doesn’t permit rentals or only has a limited number with nothing available, most people who are going to be looking at these properties are probably the individual’s intent of living there with their families. All of a sudden that won’t be the static community competing for those properties anymore. They will not be competing with investors and speculators.”

He also thinks this won’t fix the housing crisis.

“This is housing that’s going to start in the $2,000 a month bracket and upwards and that’s for a single-bedroom unit. That’s not for two- or three-bedroom family units. Yes, we have a housing crisis, but we also have a housing crisis in the sense that we don’t have family-oriented housing of two or three-bedroom units in an affordable way available to the public.”

B.C.’s new premier thinks about 3,000 of 300,000 units province-wide will be affected by this change.