This Is What Happened To My House

In March 2012 my husband and I rented our Halifax home to a young couple and their friend.  This post contains pics of the state our house was in when we took possession back on January 4th, 2014.


In posting this I thought of 'upworthy' titles such as "I rented my home to a housekeeping supervisor for a Delta Hotel and this is what happened".  

Or, "Are companies like BDO bankrupting the Nova Scotia Justice System?".  

The idea for this latter title came to me because my husband and I, upon evicting these tenants for not paying rent and trashing the place, went through all the appropriate channels for folks in our situation.   This took a lot of time, fees, and other expenses.  

In fact, this entire process struck us as a needlessly complex, expensive treasure hunt that spanned the entire Halifax Regional Municipality: several trips to the Bayer's Lake Tenancy office, then to small claims court downtown, then to Dartmouth for the registry office, back downtown to the Sheriff's office, with fees to pay at each stop.

I'll add here that while the tenants did show up to the hearing, they showed us no remorse or responsibility for any of the over $12,000 in damage they caused us, even after the judgement was awarded.  

There was no attempt to work out any sort of payment plan.  

Instead, the one with the decent hotel job whose wages we could have garnished went to BDO Halifax and declared bankruptcy to shirk their court-ordered responsibility.   

You see, for some reason the road to justice in Nova Scotia seems to end up at the door of privately run bankruptcy trustee businesses, who profit off of people like our tenants declaring bankruptcy.  

When we questioned the head of BDO Halifax about how our court win ended up thwarted by a for-profit bankruptcy trustee, his reply was "Well you wouldn't expect me to work for free, would you?".  

And, "If you think I'm going to just write you a cheque for $12,000, it ain't happening."  

We never expected or wanted this person pay us our judgment, we just wanted our tenants to take at least some level of accountability and make some sort of retribution.  

I find it ironic that the BDO Halifax head would have his hackles raised by the thought of working for free, because in the end he gets to profit off of our free labour: the clean up, the repairs, weeks spent in a filthy, rat infested house, court dates, court judgement execution and related expenses. 

Bankruptcy, apparently, is how people get away with wrecking rental properties.  Because we're not the only ones this has happened to.  From what we've heard, it has happened to plenty of landlords in Halifax. 

My guess is that the shame and embarrassment of finding your property, in this case our former home, in such a condition is what keeps landlords from sharing situations like this publicly.  

I'll admit, when it happened back in January of this year, our priority was to clean up the mess and get the house re-rented.  This took until April because of the damage.

But I've decided to post these photos as a cautionary tale for newbie landlords such as we were. 

We enjoy being landlords and providing nice homes for people with the lowest rents we can afford to offer, but from now on when in doubt, we request that a parent co-signs the lease.  

I also post these photos because I really think that tenancy board decisions that confer this amount of damage, including obvious willful destruction, ought to survive a bankruptcy.  

Perhaps the bankruptcy act needs to be changed to accommodate this.  

I've written some more about our experience with BDO Halifax, these thoughts are included after the photos.
 
So here are the pics...

Welcome to my 'smashed up garbage dump of a house tour of January 2014'!!

For starters, here is my brand new front picture bay window.  Apparently busted because housekeeper tenant encouraged their sibling to throw an axe through it.  Nice.

The front yard, covered with heavy garbage which took a contractor a few loads to the dump.

Trash piled into our driveway. In all my husband and I (mostly my husband, love you baby) removed 108 garbage bags of trash from the property, and 32 of these were the great big contractor bags.

Welcome to the living room! The beautiful new hardwood floors, lovingly installed by the former owners, were caked with cigarette butts and ashes. This was in part because the entire main floor flooded when the tenants reneged on their legal requirement to keep the house heated during winter.  The result was the oil hotwater baseboard heating system froze, burst and split the pipes in several places flooding the house.  The floors are now warped and the finish is ruined, but we don't have the money to replace them.

More shots of the living room!  Not only were the tiles near the stove all cracked, the new airtight wood burning fireplace insert was broken in ways that surprised the stove technician.  $$$.  

 It is worth noting that my mantle used to have a beautiful, antique mirror worth approx $400.  This was apparently stolen out of the house by some young male subletter,  apparently with the help of an older man (his father?).  A neighbour saw the mirror loaded into a van the night before the eviction date.  This mirror was a thoughtful gift left for me by the last homeowners - a very nice, antique-dealing older couple who were caretakers for the most excellent Waverly Inn in downtown Halifax.

Here is a pic from the cutsheet of my house with the stolen mirror.  I wonder who in Halifax is enjoying it, or if it has been resold.  At tenancy court we were told it'd be returned.  It wasn't. 

After we regained possession of our house, we got heating oil, had the line bled, and shortly found out about the heating pipe issue when water started gushing out everywhere. Lovely Metro Burner came to our rescue.  The heating pipes had to be fixed in at least 4 areas of the home.  

Ironically, before the Waverly Inn couple, our house belong to the grandparents of the heating technician who was sent over.  Small world! This fellow was clearly stunned to see what had become of his grandparents home.  We learned they used to sell square dancing clothing out of the attached shop years ago.  Fun!

Metro Burner guy's tools and stuff

Now, moving on in our tour, here is the room that used to be the master bedroom. Note there is a pile of dog shit in this shot; every room in the house had dog shit on the floor.  The basement had lots.

We realized later that one of the tenants was purposefully breeding her mutts to make money.  In the first year of the tenancy we naively believed the puppies were a one time mistake, instead this tenant had sold 2 or 3 litters for 200/pup. 

My dog, checking out the filth and other dogs' poop

My old bedroom ceiling! It completely needed to be replaced, and the room repainted, because of the water that gushed out of the busted heating pipes.

Lovely old character glass door, smashed up in a few different panes and scratched up by dogs presumably.

Welcome to my kitchen! Which, like everywhere else in the house was covered with dog shit and trash that had been torn up by rats and dogs.

 

Close up of kitchen garbage...

 

Filthy baseboards, which were also chewed up all over the house by various dogs and puppies.  Again, we just didn't have the money to start replacing things.

This oven took quite a while to clean!  And 3 cans of easy-off.  Amazing this tenancy was less than 2 years, but apparently our home was being run as some kind of drop-in shelter so I guess there were a lot of greasy things cooked here.

Moving along to the upstairs! Torn up dog hair covered filthy carpet, which eventually all had to go.

 

 One messy corner of the 2nd floor bedroom, and yes that is a big pile of dogshit at the front of the photo

 

Some more random 2nd floor trash.  Keep in mind that these photos can't convey the smells we encountered and all the ground in filth on every surface of our home.  The cleanup/repairs took my husband and I a few weeks of full time work each.

 

Rat tracks in my basement!  I lived in this home from 2008 - 2012 and never once had a rat in the house, a few mice yes.  Unfortunately because of the condition of the house rats got in, as evidenced by these tracks in baking soda we spread along all the walls....

... and just a few of the rat droppings in the basement...

... and 3 big dead rats of several that my husband was able to snipe with his bb gun in the backyard.

Yes! Here we are in the backyard.   And here is our garden shed that was filled with trash, which rats had gotten into.

 Trash was heaped in every possible area.  Here is some behind what used to be my kiln shed when I lived in this house.

 Side yard trash a la rats who had ripped up many of the bags.

 Another view of the back deck, which got smashed up by dogs and chewed through by rats because bags of trash were creatively stuffed under the deck.  I'm sure the rats appreciated their sheltered "buffet table".

Like the house, the yard was covered with dog feces, and had all sorts of trash frozen to it.  Including used tampon applicators from bathroom garbage that had been torn apart by rats.  Happy New Year to me!  Those were some fun times, prying that stuff off my frozen yard.

A shot of some sideyard trash.

Back in the house! Here's the basement and I have no idea why the floor was covered with rotting cardboard.  The tenants had also filled in our floor drains with cement, without our permission.

We were on overwhelm so didn't get good pics of all the junk in the basement which included quite a bit of filthy heavy old furniture and plenty more dogshit.  Apparently the whole house was being used as a flophouse.

As a fan of affordable accommodation, in theory it didn't bother me that a bunch of people wanted to share the house.  I actually defended this to a neighbour before the trash started piling up saying good for them! Affordable housing!  I also defended the piles of scrap wood and brush from trimmed trees being heaped in the driveway to be burnt in the stove.  I thought it was clever.  Reduce, reuse recycle.  I'll just say that it would have been nice if the youngsters that flopped here didn't trash the place and stiff us on rent.  At least they had fun painting the walls, though my husband repainted all this for the new tenants.

And, this one photo pretty much sums up the message from our tenants that we were left with. 

That's it for the photo tour, which I feel doesn't quite do justice to how messed up the house was.  There were other things taken, like a really nice shower rod and shower head.  

Some more thoughts:

In case you're wondering how and why we let our house get this bad, it happened over a couple of months while we followed the eviction process.  There was a notice from the city as the trash started to pile up but we didn't remove it ourselves as we wanted to be sure we could get these people out of our house, whoever they were.  There were random people living there who were not on the lease.  If we cleaned the yard and provided heating oil while the random people our tenants let live there occupied it, we feared it could be harder to get vacant possession.

It was a very stressful, uncomfortable couple of months. 

The irony here was that it was only a month-to-month lease, had the tenants been honest with us they could have just given notice, and a lot of this damage could have been avoided.

During the eviction process Delta housekeeping supervisor promised up and down to clean the house, and make sure the pipes wouldn't freeze.  Didn't happen.

My husband and I thought things would improve for us when we completed the tenancy court process and started getting some payments coming in.

Nope.  Only one getting paid here will be BDO Halifax.

Nova Scotian lawmakers, should you like to add cases like ours to the list of "things that survive bankruptcy" we, and I'm sure many many more landlords, would be eternally grateful.

Money aside, I feel like this could be the only way to stop the quiet epidemic of smashed up rental housing in Halifax and elsewhere.  

I really don't think that letting anyone get away with behaviour like this is good for our society.

What are people learning?  That the easy out of a bankruptcy that not only wipes out their legal consequences, but also wipes out their credit card debt, utility debt and student loans. 

Ultimately it appears that it is those of us who budget, respect laws, and live within our means who will pay for those who don't, as irresponsibility is absorbed by creditors like us while folks like BDO get to profit.

I understand that bankruptcy gives precious relief for those who find themselves in difficult circumstances, and I am glad bankruptcy exists for this reason. It is important and humane.  I believe that bankruptcy for most people would be a last resort, and not taken lightly.

However, I question the logic of the Bankruptcy Act being administered by for-profit groups such as BDO.  As the head of BDO Halifax eloquently put it during our conversation when we called to gather information about the bankruptcy process and his company's role:

“There’s this big yellow book called the Yellow Pages and if you turn to B and look under B for bankruptcy you will find there are at least 10 of us.”

And: “if someone down the road is selling widgets, and I’m selling widgets, of course I want people to buy my widget”.  

And "look, this bankruptcy is going ahead and there's nothing you can do about it".  

It was a fascinating, informative conversation because I was surprised to learn that bankruptcy is handled by for-profit companies rather than government organizations.

As an aside, no one at BDO Halifax ever informed us that creditors can ask to be named as "inspectors" on a bankruptcy case.  A lawyer, and a trustee in a different BDO office in another province we called told us about this.  

We finally just mailed back our proof of claim, a confusing document with no guidance provided, and asked to be named inspectors.

I question whether that as the gap between the rich and the poor grows in Canada, these for-profit agents of bankruptcy are presenting young adults with an easy 'get out of jail free' card.   

I find it odd that businesses like this could exist off of bankruptcies.  It means they require a steady supply of bankruptcies to stay afloat.

It makes me wonder if bankruptcies are beginning to be handed out like credit cards on college campuses.

My suspicion is that this reality has the potential to create an entire class of trash-happy young Canadians with nothing to lose that will continually need to be supported by those who choose to work hard and play by the rules.

It is worth noting that our bad-tenant experience is also impacting our credit ratings due to the credit card debt we racked up to cover our losses.  It doesn't seem fair that we're being punished, while our tenants get an easy out. 

The trustee in another province I contacted thoughtfully put the onus on us for not picking better tenants.

Obviously we'd never knowingly rent to people we thought would be capable of allowing our house to end up like this, and a lot of the damage was likely due to people living in the house that we had never even met or interviewed.

I suspect that as foreign investment in Canada drives up the prices on housing, everywhere, and wages stagnate, and education increases in expense, this problem is just going to keep getting worse.  

I think there will be more and more young people who say, screw it, I can just go bankrupt, inspired by these for-profit bankruptcy trustees.  

Maybe economists don't even realize it is a problem, but I wonder what the real cost is to the Canadian economy.  I wonder how this trend, if it is even a trend, can possibly be curtailed.  

Maybe it is too late.  Maybe the ease of bankruptcy is destined to contribute to the gap between the rich and the poor as some people might end up resigned to a life of ruined credit.  

On a broader societal level, the story may also be eye opening as an illustration of the lifestyle that some millennials have decided is appropriate.  Because I know that ours is the only rental property that has ended up this way.  

Maybe my property has inadvertently served as a 'public art installation' referencing a troubled generation.

Whatever the case it still sucks for us.

As much as I hate what these youngsters did to my house, and I hate that I spent so much of 2014 alternating between outrage and depression, I'd like to think I had this experience for a reason.  Maybe by documenting and sharing this story somehow something is going to change.  I suspect this change would require amendments to the Bankruptcy Act.   

I think in the long run these changes would benefit both landlords and tenants, by forcing people to take responsibility for their actions, eg, forcing them to take out their own trash.  Not only could we really use the money, I think it would be good for our tenants to pay their debt to us, even if it takes them years.  I think it would be a positive step towards their behaving as mature members of society.  I thought this is what the justice system was for, and what would happen after all our driving around and fee-paying to adhere to the process.

With respect to the Bankruptcy Act, the head of BDO Halifax made it pretty clear that I'd be wasting my time trying to change how things are.

I reminded him people have managed to change many things in the past.  I said maybe our story belongs on the front page of newspapers.  Maybe how the bankruptcy industry really works is something more people need to be made aware of.

He didn't have much to say to that. 

A few days after this conversation, I spoke to a court administrator, who shared that bankruptcy costs the province all sorts of lost money in terms of lost court fees.  He said he doesn't understand how companies like BDO make money off the bankrupt.  He figured students loans would have to be repaid, and utility companies like Nova Scotia Power would deny hookups until they were paid back.

Not so.  Student loans can be forgiven if they are 7 years old, and when I called up someone in charge of bankruptcy at Nova Scotia Power they said for amounts such as what my tenant owed, they generally wouldn't even bother filing a proof of claim, and by law they can't deny power hook ups to the bankrupt.  At most they may be able to ask for a deposit for new accounts

Bankruptcy then starts to look like a sweet deal for young low income earners: get loans and go study whatever you want, run up your power bills, get credit cards, spend your cash at the bar and on smokes to butt out on the floor of your rental place, fill it with trash and jam out on rent to the next rental place, and then get BDO to wipe your slate clean.

Maybe this explains why during other tenant change-overs we've seen large utility bills get run up as evidenced by bills that were left behind.

This means that responsible rate payers end up covering for the utility bills of the disenfranchised youth.  In a province where everyone is quick to complain about high power bills, it makes me wonder how much our for-profit bankruptcy system is costing those who actually make a point of paying their bills.

Maybe bankruptcy should be handled as part of the provincial justice system, and not justice upheld by the for-profit sector.  

In the current system it looks to me like there is far too much opportunity for corruption and bending of the rules, where we have companies that need people to go bankrupt to make ends meet.  

Were bankruptcy only available through the court system, all fees would go back to the province.  I imagine that this option would be abused much less and people like our tenants would be encouraged to pay the debts to the creditors which won judgements against them.    

I imagine justice would be upheld rather than dribbled away into for-profit trustee fees.

I got this far in the post and wondered if there were any numbers to back up my suspicions.  I didn't look very hard but here's an article indicating that bankruptcies are on the rise among youth:

Younger Canadians More At Risk From Debt

Note this is an article by one of those other for-profit bankruptcy businesses. 

I hope some people with the authority to make changes does look into this issue. 

If the act isn't changed, I'm not sure what the point of the Residential Tenancies Act and tenancy court is.  Maybe instead of a lease landlords may as well just hand their tenants a bag of hammers and hope for the best.