Quebec's mandatory real estate disclosure law punishes grieving families

 

 Since 2012 a Quebec law has been punishing families who suffered a tragic loss to suicide or murder. 

 Quebec's mandatory property sellers declaration forces those grieving, traumatized families when they sell their homes to answer  "has there ever been a suicide or violent death in the immovable?" 

  So if your son commits suicide in your basement or your wife is murdered in your bathroom, not only are you forced to deal with the shock of the event, but Quebec forces you to deteriorate the value of your home by disclosing the event,l which has no structural bearing on the property.  

  Quebec, with the law, recognizes the existences of ghosts, which  in fact do not exist and never have.       

  The law further punishes families who have suffered a tragic loss and opens the door to litigious hidden defect parasites to cash in on grieving families.  

  It also incentivizes property owners to cover up any suicide or violent death that takes place in their homes, indeed if you can get away with it, you'd greatly gain if you pulled any fresh suicide or murder victim off your property onto the sidwalk. 

   No other Canadian province requires a vendor to disclose any such prior event unless specifically asked.  

  Iin the usa vendors aren't required to disclose suicide or murder cases on the property except in California where the question is limited to the previous three years and Alaska, where it's one year.    Three of four states have laws that specify that a vendor must answer truthfully if asked and several states don't have any mention of it at all in their law.   

  Thanks to Quebec's contrived law, bidders are literally taking advantage of another person's tragedy.     One study from 2001 in Ohio suggested that homes would sell for three percent less when purchasers were informed of murders and suicides on the property. 

  The homes also stayed on the market 45 percent longer than others.     

  That three percent represents almost $20,000 on the sale of an average Montreal home which goes for nearly $600,000.     

  Prior ot the law Quebec's Civil Code never suggested that vendors be obliged to make any such revelations. 

   Judges didn't interpret the code's spirit of good faith requirement to extend to offering a historical recollection of the people who lived in the property, as witnessed in the Knight vs Dionne ruling.   "Deaths, suicides and even murder in a home can't be considered factors that the vendor is obliged to reveal to the purchaser," wrote Justice Gabriel de Pokomandy in 2006, in a decision that rewarded the plaintiff no money.    

   But in 2011 a judge awarded $1,000 to home buyers Kattia Pineda and Jorge Bautista who sought $7,000 (small claims court maximum) from vendors Lucillia Ferreira and Bernardino Ferreira, noting that the vendor's father-in-law had committed suicide on the property and they weren't made aware of it.    The plaintiffs admitted that they didn't suffer any lost income or goods but they said that they felt distress and anguish and had a hard time sleeping after learning of the suicide, although they produced no medical claims supporting their assertions.  

   Soon after, vendors were forced to fill out a form called Declarations by the seller of the immovable which demands vendors they reveal past murders and suicides that took place in the building.     

   It didn't take long for the first case to roll in.    

   A Quebec couple named Jean-Francois Fortin and Sandra Bolduc purchased a home from Jean-Guy Mercier on Oct. 19, 2012 for $275,000.    

  They knew that a murder suicide had taken place on the property but they were led to believe that it took place in the garage and not the basement.    

  Blabbermouth neighbours set the purchasers straight about the slightly-different location of the grisly slaying. The purchasers suddenly didn't want the property and a judge awarded them a full refund and ordered the vendor to pay the plaintiffs $38,000.     

  Once again: Quebec is the only province with a stigmatized property law.    

  It's almost certain that in the entire life of your old house a whole slew of unpleasant things happened at the very spot you sit down on your couch or eat your spaghetti.    

  Did somebody poke someone's eye out 80 years ago in the exact spot you're sitting right now?    Would you lose sleep if they did? Are you a victim for not being informed of this?    

 What about verbal humiliation and mental cruelty, should a vendor be obliged to offer details of that?    Should landlords also be required to inform tenants of unpleasant things that happened in their units?    Anybody suffering angst about such things needs to know this: ghosts don't exist.    

  The disclosure law also contradicts the government's own policy, which suggests that suicides are private affairs as the Quebec coroner insists that media never bring them to light. 

   So the mandatory disclosure is a violation of that principle. 

   These days courts are jammed with hidden defect shakedowns, many entirely frivolous and inspired by buyers remorse, for every case that goes to court, there are many more that were settled outside as a shakedown over imaginary ghosts.  Quebec needs to join the adult world and repeal the law as soon as possible.