Serial rent-skippers prompts calls for a bad-tenants registry

A lot of people may have trouble summoning much sympathy for landlords, what with all the horror stories about renters living in ill-maintained, bug-infested homes or being subjected to "renovictions" so the owner could jack up the rent.

But there are, of course, an equal number of bad tenants who trash homes and skip out on the rent.

One particularly egregious example has B.C. landlords calling for a bad-tenants registry after a couple stiffed five different landlords over a two-year period, CBC News reports.

British Columbia's Residential Tenancy Branch is supposed to deal with disputes between renters and their landlords, but apparently it's powerless when it comes to concerted scammers.

"The Residential Tenancy Act should have had their names on there so we could call in and say, 'I would like to rent to these people' and what they could say to me would be 'I would not recommend that,'" landlord Kim Gouws told CBC News.

Gouws is one of the five landlords owed thousands of dollars from a Lower Mainland couple who allegedly move into their properties and don't bother paying rent.

Gouws said she's owned $5,000 in back rent for the suburban Maple Ridge home the couple rented from her in late January.

She said she allowed the couple to move in early but learned later they'd been served with an eviction notice at their previous rented home, CBC News said.

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"We did a lot to allow them to come in when they wanted to," she said. "And then the original rent cheque and the deposit cheque bounced."

The couple has since moved out and Gouws learned she wasn't the only landlord they'd stiffed.

"She just been going from one to the other to the other and I don't know if those people get paid anything," she said.

CBC News said its investigation turned up documentary evidence the couple lived rent-free in at least five homes going back to August 2012.

Suman Parasad said the couple lived in her Maple Ridge rental home for several months, ignoring her eviction order.

"They refused, and the last time I went and asked, she said 'I'll go when I want to.' That really made me angry, and so I called the court bailiffs and said, 'evict them right now,'" Parasad, who was out $7,900, told CBC News.

Parasad won a complaint against the couple before the tenancy board but then had to go to small claims court several times before the couple began repaying her at a rate of $450 a month, CBC News said.

Other landlords who rented to the couple had similar experiences. Noel Beauileau also served them with an eviction notice after rent cheques bounced. The couple seemed to be expecting it, he said.

"They knew more about the Residential Tenancy Act than we did," he told CBC News. "They knew all the steps and they were anticipating each step as we took it."

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CBC News identified the couple as Susan and Chris Perret.

Susan Perret dodged questions from CBC News about why the couple wasn't paying rent.

"Well, there's a whole bunch of issues for everybody, right?" Perret said, referring questions to her lawyer.

Landlords can search a database maintained by the Tenancy Bureau, a U.S.-based private organization that operates in several countries, including Canada. It allows landlord to share experiences about bad tenants.

But an official list of bad tenants (and bad landlords, for that matter) operated by a province's tenancy agency seems to make sense. Vancouver last year launched a searchable list of problematic landlords as an incentive for property owners to keep their units in good condition.