A rent registry? CORPIQ is against it!

Not surprisingly, CORPIQ has always been opposed to the creation of a public rental rent registry. It is important to describe the facts, but also the experiences of other jurisdictions with this type of project.

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Ontario had a major failure with the creation of its rent registry in the 1990s. The costs associated with its creation were estimated to be close to $35 million, and the management costs of keeping it up to date each year were close to $10 million. All this money was spent on bureaucracy when we, here in Quebec, have one of the best laws for rental unit landlords. It is in this perspective that it is difficult to conceive that the addition of bureaucracy can be beneficial when efforts should rather be focused on the creation and rebalancing of markets, by creating more housing, will certainly contribute to the solutions of the current housing crisis in several regions of Quebec.

The first consequence generated by the rent registry in Ontario is that landlords have withdrawn units that were the least profitable, and therefore the most accessible to vulnerable clienteles, but which were not financially viable for them. In the Quebec context of housing scarcity, this is obviously an effect that we want to avoid at all costs. It would be unthinkable to ask landlords to perpetuate housing at below-market rents, and in a way, to subsidize their tenants.

The other aspect of the implementation of a rent registry is that it would create more confrontations between tenants and landlords when there are already more than 40,000 cases in the Tribunal administratif du logement annually.

Also, some tenants could come into conflict with other tenants by noticing that their rent is higher than another, while the quality of the dwelling is not taken into account in an objective way (i.e. if appliances are included, if recent renovations have been done, if additional services are available to the tenant).

It is necessary to put into perspective that in Quebec, we have laws and legislations that deserve to be improved, such as clause G which already exists in a lease when a tenant and a landlord sign. A rent registry, in fact, adds a much more costly layer to an already false solution to the issue of accessibility and affordability of housing, and does nothing to solve the housing crisis and stimulate landlords to invest.

CORPIQ is preparing an argument that will be more substantial than these few explanatory lines. For the moment, the idea of the implementation of a rent registry leads tenants to believe, like a mirage, that it will contain the price of rents when this has never been demonstrated in any legislation.