Higher rents raising Rental Board stakes

    Renting an apartment in Montreal has become a much higher-stakes game than it was just a few years back.
   Rents are way up, so it is harder for some tenants to pay their rent. And when a tenant fails to pay, many landlords fall into danger of losing their property as their mortgages are often correspondingly higher than those of previous generations.
   But quite amazingly one out of ever 10 or 15 cases at the rental board is of a landlord who has procrastinated in proceeding against a non-payer, so the final debt those tenants owe upon leaving can become staggering, sometimes $4,000 or more.
   Some examples from this month:
   Someone named Wallace Cash was a tenant of Maria de Jesus Cardoso. She passed away and he failed to pay his $650 for so long that it ended up becoming a debt of $4,400 before he finally got ordered out by those handling the estate.
   It is bad news for the landlord but also bad news for Cash whose failure to pony up is now on public record and will not help him find an apartment in the future.
   Similarly, Francis Mbaioremem lived at a $515 apartment rented to him by Paul Fusco without paying rent for the past seven months. By the time he was ordered to leave in a court decision handed down a few days ago, the tenant owed $3,350 in back rent.
   The landlord can try to recoup those debts money if they can figure out where the former tenant works or banks, but in most cases the tenant simply gets away with never paying that debt.
   Jacques Ouellette stopped paying his $460 rent in April and his landlord Yves Surprenant was a bit slow to file his papers, as a result Ouellette was only just recently forced to leave when his debt had gone up over $3,200.
   I do not know the details of this or other cases, but such a nightmare often starts when a landlord shows sympathy to a tenant who explains that he is only temporarily behind and promises to pay the rent due when a cheque comes through or when his aunt comes in from the Gaspe after getting her wisdom teeth extracted and so on.
   That charade becomes increasingly hard to maintain as the debt grows and eventually the landlord, feeling bitterly betrayed, goes to the Rental Board and by this time there is considerably hostility and rudeness.
     And recently in Drummondville a landlord named Justin Verville lost out over $4,000 due to a non-paying tenant named Magali Tremblay.
   Those results came in just a few minutes of research but surely there are dozens of other tenants evicted after running up debts of $4,000 and more and that is quite a lot of money.
   If you have a tenant, it is worth keeping your eye on the ball. Every day that tenant is in arrears is a bad thing, chances are the debt will grow.
   Keep in mind that you can file as early as the second of the month against a non-payer and then amend the file after the 23rd to include the option of expulsion. This will send a message to the tenant that you are serious about collecting and it will also make the case go a lot faster if the tenant fails to pony up. The tenant will be responsible for the $75 fee anyway,