The recent lifting of COVID-19 restrictions is slowly starting up the tourism industry in BC, and those who rent in Vancouver are worried that landlords will be enticed to list properties on Airbnb etc. in order to make more money in the short-term rental market.
The renting market in Vancouver is already under fire for being inaccessible and filled with exuberant, non-regulated prices.
There are some protections available to renters but the process to prove that a landlord has acted in bad-faith is difficult.
“They have to get evicted first, find a new place to live, move, and then sit there on Airbnb every single day and look for their old apartment to show up. That’s not an easy system,” explained Megan Milton, a volunteer with the Vancouver Tenants Union to News1130.
Vancouver has collaborative regulations in place with AirBnb that date back to 2018 in order to track any illegal Airbnbs. However, whether a landlord plans to illegally list on AirBnb doesn’t change that fact that tenants will get evicted before anything happens. It’s on the tenants to find any wrongdoing by the landlord and report it timely, which is not always a priority for people trying to find a new place to live in a crunch.
“This actually happens all the time. Landlord-use evictions are notorious for having folks be evicted under false pretences and then find their rental up, being rented again. It’s a very difficult thing to enforce.” Milton told News1130