When I asked Tara how she feels after finally finding a rental house in Burnaby that wasn’t complete garbage, she paused for a moment before letting out an audible sigh of joy.
The journey has been that difficult.
“The search was hell,” said Tara, who didn’t want her full name used because, despite finding a new home, she may end up searching again and doesn’t want future landlords to think she’s “difficult.” But I know her and agreed because I know her story to be true.
The Burnaby mom was forced to look for a new rental home for her husband, kids and pets because of a toxic landlord. This presented several problems because Tara wanted to find a home near her children’s school, and she wanted a home that wasn’t awful.
That second part turned out to be tougher than Tara thought as she poured through rental listings. Tara wanted to rent a house, or at least most of a house, so that they had room and a backyard.
Tara found rents as high as $4,800 a month for houses that were often in terrible shape.
“I visited houses that hadn’t been cleaned at all, had bugs on the windows, filthy carpets and they were asking for top dollar,” said Tara. “Some of these owners would literally make no effort to show the place. And they can because so many people are looking for housing.”
One house Tara visited had a large yellow stain on the wall. She asked the property manager if they were going to paint over it and was told no “because they had already painted the place in the past year.”
“If the owner isn’t willing to paint over a stain, then that says something about what they are like as a landlord,” she said.
Then there was the behaviour of some of the landlords, who she called “shady.” Some would show up “dishevelled” and dressed in just a bathrobe and slippers.
Tara knows the rights of renters well and so she asks questions of the landlords, but said many of them either don’t know the rules or just don’t care about them.
“Some homeowners in Burnaby, they just want to go their own way and don’t want to go by the book,” Tara said. “You can tell they want to cut corners.”
Most of them asked extremely invasive questions before she had even come to see the house in person.
Tara had become despondent by her search as dozens of leads fizzled out when she finally visited them.
And then, miraculously, she came across an amazing landlord who owned a house just blocks from her children’s school. The two of them hit it off right away and he answered all the right questions. The place was more than Tara wanted to pay - $3,700 a month – and they would have to share laundry, but pretty much every other box on the checklist was ticked.
You can hear the relief in Tara’s voice and she talks about it. She almost can’t believe it.
“I’m not trying to say that all Burnaby homeowners are a**holes, but this is what we saw,” Tara said. “But we managed to finally get it right.”
And it’s a relief also because Tara and her family once moved to Burnaby from Vancouver simply as a matter of finances, but the place has grown on them.
“Now we feel like we want to stay in Burnaby because we like it so much here,” she said.
Follow Chris Campbell at Twitter.com/shinebox44.
