The Landlord-Tenancy Relationship

70 and counting

I am looking for a new label for my blogging posts.

Though every experience a person writes about calls out for a new title, still I want to have one large category: thus, 70 and counting. That is going to be my new blog label as I try to write my heart out.

Tonight, for example, having nothing better to do and feeling far less than 70 years old, I went to the university to enjoy one of the public education seminars presented by the law faculty: The Landlord-Tenant Relationship.

The presenter asked, “I presume you are all tenants here?” but not all raised their hands.

Then he asked, “Landlords?” A few hands went up.

“Law students?” That was about half the group and I noticed some of the law students were also landlords.

There we were, a strange mix: landlords, students, tenants, a few law professors. From the sound of it, more than a few of the landlords and the tenants had already been to court.

“Not that you might be the one in the situation you describe,” said the lawyer to one question, “but it is not in anyone’s best interest to go to court and tell the judge one has an illegal basement suite.” That line gave me the biggest chortle of the evening. The lawyer continued, “But to try to answer your question more broadly, when I was a student, I was in the predicament you describe and I will tell you what happened....” Ah, what fun!

I am a slave of my pen. People say interesting stuff and my hand grabs a pen (it doesn’t even have to be mine) and I start writing. I ended the evening with five pages of new information – typical for me. And I will probably read my notes over before I go to bed tonight.

I have no idea who I am going to tell all of that stuff to, since I would probably have to hog-tie someone to get them to listen, or even knock them out cold to get them to stay in the same room if I started reading my notes out loud.

Tonight’s speaker does commercial real estate litigation for a living, but he started at zero for us, and then told us the tenant’s and the landlord’s side of lease contracts, highlighting common issues: what happens when a lease violates the landlord tenant act; what happens when the landlord wants a tenant to leave; what are the consequences of not paying rent; how and when can Alberta landlords increase the rent. (Yikes! It is legal to increase someone’s rent from $500 a month to $4,500 a month in Alberta.) As the landlord, you might really want your tenants to leave in that case.

All of that fun, and cruellers and a selection of soft drinks as well.

The 8 pm walk home through the new fallen snow was beautiful, an extra bonus for the evening.

70 and counting.

Arta