OLA in The Globe and Mail today

[HLL]

Both Jane and I can be credited with the OLA plug. I'm very pleased with how it turned out, although the reporter did overstate the doom and gloom. I'm definitely not despairing, despite the magnitude of the past year's surprises! It sure is a LOT of work. Passive investment= NOT!

I agree: let's get the OLA name out. I have a couple ideas to grow our Ottawa membership: 1) have a LL meeting and invite LLs in the community (i've mentioned this in the past week already) 2) advertise OLA at the upcoming "making your housing smoke-free" events for LLs given by Ottawa public health in November.

If someone has ideas for a leaflet we could distribute (or better yet, if you want to make one!), I'll pay to print them and arrange to have them distributed at the meetings. Also I need speakers for the Ottawa meeting I want to organize.

HLL

An OLA member created this: http://www.ontariolandlordassociation.com/?p=219

Brilliant! Thanks Canuck. I'm glad some people here have the skills to put things like this together as I'm not a visual person at all.

I'll print them out and hand them out at the next mtg. Let's hope it works!

[New]

I'm going to print some out and hand them out at the LTB hearing room.

[ccd]

I found this site from the Globe.

I have experience as a landlord in Ontario and Alberta. Tenants are usually a disaster all over, but in alberta, the landlord is not hobbled by ontario style laws that favour criminals.

In Alberta you have security deposits, you can seize property for unpaid rents, there is a 10 day period for renters to claim return of their security. Most dont come back because the damage they caused is usually equal to the deposit. The only good news is that for the time I lost money, the cap gain was so huge that REVCAN did just fine by me when I sold.

I was a landlord in Ontario, part of the building was commercial and those tenants are bound by contract only, not snivelling cry baby rules that allow welfare queens to destroy your property and not pay rent.

So I never lost money on that one, but it was hard to collect the residential portion. Just because you refuse to control your fecundity, does not mean I am responsible to house you.

A friend of mine, another landlord, filed , won a judgement, kept it viable and chased down a deadbeat 5 years later and with interest. The bailiff seized a car and some other property to satisfy the judgement, but in Ontario, it is a rare thing.

[BigFoot]

Good for him! It's easy to give up chasing someone, because it's a long process and often it's easier to just mentally write off the loss and get on with it.
However, it's GREAT when deadbeats learn that they actually ARE responsible for their debts....with interest.