The pandemic has been difficult on landlords but it nevertheless highlights the importance of working with tenants who, because of job loss, were incapable of paying rent on time and finding solutions.<\/p>\n
Chris Graham, co-owner Shoreline Property Management, says his firm managed to get ahead of the problem and still had a 93% collection rate, down from 98% pre-pandemic, at the peak of its tenants\u2019 job losses.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe got ahead of things a little bit here,\u201d he said. \u201cWe sent a letter out to all of our tenants saying this will be an issue and \u2018We understand that you may be out of a job and it might be more difficult to pay, so give us a call because we\u2019re all in this together.\u2019 That sparked a lot of contacts.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shoreline\u2014whose owners run Palm Tree Investments, which invests in the multifamily sector\u2014frequently reached out to municipal government agencies across the Ontario jurisdictions in which it has rental properties\u2014Barrie, Wasaga Beach, Midland, Brighton, Trenton, Belleville and Kingston\u2014inquiring about programs to help tenants. The company established payment plans for its tenants, which were staggered for the most part.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome would dip into savings, but there was a lag time between the issue we were going through and CERB [Canada Emergency Response Benefit] kicking in and giving people the money they needed to get by, and that lag time was the highest anxiety-inducing side of it,\u201d Graham said. \u201cIf it was a couple of hundred bucks bi-weekly, great; we still need to make sure we get caught up, though, but we weren\u2019t going to start chasing down our tenants. Instead, we worked with them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shoreline was sympathetic to the plight of its tenants who were unable to pay their rents, but it had its own mortgages to pay. Thankfully, Graham says, mortgage deferrals were lifelines of sorts.<\/p>\n
Hayth Property Management\u2019s Randy Hayer says that dealing with tenants during the pandemic required compassion and a gentle touch. Complicating matters is that many tenants were reluctant to allow visitors into their apartments because, at the inception of the pandemic, few understood how dangerous COVID-19 actually was.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe haven\u2019t seen anything like this in modern times; everyone was learning on the fly,\u201d Hayer said. \u201cThe property owners we had as clients were mostly understanding so long as they received some payment because they didn\u2019t want to risk defaulting on their mortgage payments. They reduced rent in many cases.\u201d<\/p>\n
Property management companies typically refer to tenants who don\u2019t pay rent to collections agencies, often after a single missed payment, but Hayer says that unusual times call for different approaches.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe dealt with students a lot and they usually had nowhere else to live. We\u2019d break up their payments into instalments over the year for the months that they missed. We\u2019re human and we understand their plight because we have families ourselves, so we didn\u2019t want to put people in impossible situations. We made sure the tenants were on board with our plans. It\u2019s important to set people up for success, not failure.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The pandemic has been difficult on landlords but it nevertheless highlights the importance of working with tenants who, because of job loss, were incapable of paying rent on time and finding solutions. Chris Graham, co-owner Shoreline Property Management, says his firm managed to get ahead of the problem and still had a 93% collection rate, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":27471,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadianrealestatemagazine.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9332"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadianrealestatemagazine.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadianrealestatemagazine.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadianrealestatemagazine.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadianrealestatemagazine.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9332"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadianrealestatemagazine.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23991,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadianrealestatemagazine.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9332\/revisions\/23991"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadianrealestatemagazine.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadianrealestatemagazine.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadianrealestatemagazine.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadianrealestatemagazine.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}