During Montreal’s busiest moving weekend housing groups took the opportunity to shed light on rental issues.
The groups say rent in Montreal is too high and there's a growing need for social housing.
Concerned that tenants don’t always know what they’re paying for, housing advocates are calling for a provincial register.
“We want a public register of rents all over the Province,” said housing advocate Maxime Roy-Allard. “So the tenants know what the past tenants actually paid. Now they don't know anything.”
There already is a website that provides some rental information – Myrent.quebec has an interactive map of the city, showing how much tenants pay and the average cost of utilities. However, there's no way to check if the information provided is accurate.
“There's not many numbers on those sites unfortunately,” said Roy-Allard.
In an effort to cool the housing market in cities such as Toronto, the Ontario government recently put a limit on how much a landlord can increase the rent.
“We want Quebec to follow Ontario's example,” said Roy-Allard. “In Ontario every apartment is under rent control which would oblige the landlord to follow in what they are allowed to increase. In Quebec it's a free for all.”
Hans Brouillete with the Quebec Landlords Corporation disagrees and points out that in other provinces owners can ask for extra things like key deposits- which aren’t allowed in Quebec.
“We have landlords who prefer not to rent their apartments instead of being challenged by the tenants who want to challenge the rents,” he said.
In Quebec, information about previous tenants’ rent is supposed to be in every lease and requires the landlord to list either the lowest rent was in the past year, or the fixed rent, but that information isn’t available to the public.
