Quote:
Originally Posted by misher
BC in a bit of a pickle as up to 50% of tenants refusing to pay rent. This despite the fact that most of them are still being paid. With the government refusing to allow evictions tenants are of course now abusing the leniency which is going to screw a large chunk of owners who rent and their employees and janitorial staff.
https://biv.com/article/2020/04/bc-landlords-seeing-50-tenants-not-paying-rent |
I mean, "refusing" is an awfully loaded term, Misher. By your apparent logic, people's employers are likewise
refusing to pay them despite most of them still making revenue. Yet we're rightly calling that a calamitous cascading economic crisis due to COVID-19 and not intimating that employers laying off staff are deadbeats for taking advantage of the crisis to save a buck.
For a more accurate quote from the same article, the lede, in fact, consider this:
Goodman Commercial Inc. surveyed a dozen multi-family property owners of varying sizes and found that between 1% and 50% of those landlords’ tenants didn’t pay their rent this month.
source
Not to minimize the impact on commercial landlords experiencing a 50% drop in rental income, but 1-50% is a huge range and we're only talking twelve commercial landlords having been surveyed, so we can hardly consider this statistically significant. It's also not terribly surprising that many, many folks are unable to pay their rent after weeks of dwindling or lost wages (and jobs) and the lag time of the emergency economic aid programs being spun up. The commercial landlords can draw down on their internal reserves and credit facilities, and request repayment flexibility and short-term loans from their creditors to bridge the weeks (or months) before cashflow can recover as affected tenants access and receive emergency financial aid and, hopefully, weather the economic crisis and return to work on the other side.
This quote,
"To date, the B.C. and federal governments have not announced any kind of support measure for landlords facing a decline in revenue due to tenants not paying rent.", is also highly dubious. Commercial landlords have the ability to access interest free government-backed loans-with-grants, wage subsidies, direct-to-landlord rent subsidies, lower financing costs through rate cuts, and CMHC troubled asset purchase programs to relieve pressure on creditors and let them offer greater flexibility to manage commercial lending.
If it's an independent unincorporated landlord renting out their basement or rental property, their loss of rental income should let them qualify for the range of individual- and household-based emergency support measures targeted for self-employed folks not eligible for EI. Moreover, they can work with their creditors to defer mortgage payments for their affected rental properties. That's assuming they do not have the ability to float a month without income, which landlords should anticipate from time to time when tenancy ends.
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