All Forum Posts by: Roy N.

Russell Gooding

Lease Options can be viable if structured properly, or they can be a big invitation for CRA to fill your dance card.

I would suggest you search 'Lease Option' here on BP and pay particular attention to the ramblings ... err ... eloquent teachings of @Bill Gulley on the subject.

For a Canadian treatment of the subject have a look at either:

There is also a fairly lengthy CRA bulletin on the subject ... drop me a PM if you are interested and I'll dig it out.

Scott W.

We acquired a building where tenants in one unit had 5-pets (3-dogs, 2-cats). The tenants had a practice of putting down absorbant pads at the end of a hallway by the bathroom door {my partner called them Doggie Diapers}. When we took moisture readings in that area during the pre-purchase inspection, they were off the scale ... as was the odor.

In this case, there was a 3/4" plywood subfloor with ~2" of hard foam (polystyrene) insulation between it and the concrete slab. After initial attempts to dry, treat/de-oder, and seal the subfloor we ended up pulling the plywood and insulation; treating the concrete slab and relaying a new subfloor.

In this case the subfloor was floated and easy to replace. Had we been dealing with wooden planks, or plywood, on floor joists, we would have expended more effort to save the floor, but it is possible the subfloor would have to be pulled and replaced in the end.

Russell Gooding

Welcome to BP! You will find lots of great information and minds here.

You will also here lots of talks about 25-40K single family homes and 70 - 100K 4-plexes ... creatures that have been extinct in Canada since the 1980s.

As you have already acknowledged, there are differences between investing in real estate on the northern side of the 49th - chiefly in the areas of financing and taxation. So absorbe all you can here and when you have a Canadian specific question, give a shout out to the East.

I still think it's like Sasquatch or the "Eastern Panther" ... lots of claims and stories, but I've never seen one in person ;-)

It really depends upon where you look. In most of Canada, any property you could find that would rent for >=2% of the purchase price would be in a declining area where there will soon be no one to rent.

The days of sending blanket "spam" messages are dwindling and methods to detect and discard them are making this approach less effective.

The "new generation" of scammers/spammers are using "big data" to mine many social media and on-line forums to build profiles on individuals. When these new spammers/scammers/etc. reach out to you they will know a surprising amount of information about you; your interestes, hobbies, causes; your {online} acquaintances and the organisations/institutions with whom you deal.

From the "geek seat" of my non real estate job {Information Security & Privacy), it has been interesting watching this evolution. It has also been extremely disheartening watching it be successful with seniors in particular {just as the telephone scammer targets the elderly, so do many of their online peers}.

We are all going to receive more of these unsolicited emails where the author sounds like they know us, or are a friend of a friend.

David Krulac:

I have provided computer forensic services on 4 child pornography cases - back earlier in my carrier before the police services had developed in-house competency. During the forth case, I decided I would never work another as I was not able to disengage sufficiently to perform the required tasks.

These investigations often involve public wifi services, work-place networks, and ISP/Carrier infrastructure. You do not hear these folks being 'named' in the news reports ... unless it's a remark about how they cooperated with authorities during the investigation.

We make it unmistakably clear to our tenants that we are capable of monitoring network traffic to/from each individual unit in the building and will cooperate with authorities if requested.

On another note: Though we provide a "one payment" option to our tenants. Utilities are covered under a separate agreement as an addendum to the lease. We require a pre-payment of utility costs at the start of each month. We provide tenants with copies of the utility bills and every three months we reconcile their monthly payments with the amount actually billed. The the actual utilities costs were lower, we provide the option of retaining the balance in the account (for future months where utility costs will be greater) or applying the balance towards their next month's rent.

If the actual utilities costs were greater than they prepayment amount, we invoice the tenante for the balance {this has only happened once}.

Jon K.

My personal buildings are not 200 units - but I have designed and overseen the implementation of networks for larger complexes. If done properly, your litany of problems are not applicable {that's simply not how large networks are built}.

Doing this does not make you an ISP reseller - you would not be purchasing a consumer offering and the terms of service would be different - and usually negotiated {Yes, I have built large networks in your country as well}.

What you have made clear, is you believe providing a bundled communications utility to be not right for you, which is completely fine.

We, on the other hand, will continue to provide our tenants with the option of a Utilities agreement along with their lease in which they can select wich utilities they would like to have bundled, as we believe it is a differentiator in our current markets.

Jon K.

A bit of sensationalism there. I've been designing secure data and telecommunications (both local/metro and international) networks for over 25 years. Your list of worries are easily addressed with proper design and implementation. None of my tenants see each other's communications traffic - each unit has it's own network (physical and logical) which are multiplexed onto a common fibre feed from the building ... a very similar design to office buildings/campuses.

The technology is a strawman in this debate, the real issue is agency and responsibility for oneself versus liability for the actions of another.

While Canada may be a less litigious society than the U.S.A., the core of the issue is you are not responsible for illegal behaviour of others - your tenants in this case - unless you knowingly condone or enable those illegal activities. Providing a bundled utility (electrical or communications) with the rent of a unit does not constitute "knowingly enabling" criminal activity ... if it did, you would see very different behaviour from the hotel industry.

It is possible that, in the land where spilling coffee on your lap nets you a milling dollar civil settlement, there may be a level of {frivolous?} liability those of us from elsewhere do not understand.

I would not provide "free" Internet service either - after all, I am running a business. That does not mean, I would not bundle it with other services and utilities provided to my tenants.

I am still curious why seasoned landlords treat the "Internet" utility differently than the other utilities at their properties.

Is it because the Internet is still viewed as a "new" thing? [BTW: It is better than 30-years old and some of us have been using it since the early 1980s] I'm sure there were landlords once upon a time would not provide electrical nor telephony services for "the obvious reason".

Yes, but you are also a debtor on your first property which is now leveraged. :-)