The Toronto Star Newspapers Limited has won a legal victory in its bid to gain more transparency in Ontario tribunals, including the Landlord and Tenant Board. The court ruling resolves a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of tribunals that withhold records...

Nightmare tenants don't start out that way. They seem nice -- at first. Before they stop paying rent or start making threats. It's extremely difficult to flag someone who is being dishonest, especially in the 45 minutes to an hour that a landlord typically spends with...

Small landlords in Seattle are taking on the city's new tenant screening restrictions, one ordinance at a time. In March, a court handed landlords a victory by declaring the city's first-in-time ordinance unconstitutional. Now, the Pacific Legal Foundation has filed a...

It seems every time you read a newspaper there's another story about a tenant who trashed a rental property. And it seems that behind every landlord nightmare story, there's a manipulative tenant -- someone who pretended to be qualified, then stopped paying rent and...

A New Brunswick landlord  finds himself advocating for a change in rental laws after tenants wrecked his property in under two months. According to a news report, the tenants told the sympathetic landlord that they were struggling financially and couldn't afford to...

Imagine if every applicant who applied for your vacancies was qualified. Tenant screening would be a breeze! Unfortunately, landlords don't have it so easy. A high volume of calls from interested applicants doesn't make it any easier to choose the right one. What does...

The majority of small or do-it-yourself landlords are risking income loss from ineffective leasing policies, according to a study conducted by Real Property Management, the nation's largest property management franchise. The study, implemented by Liminality, Inc. of...

Last year, Seattle's City Council passed an ordinance that required landlords there to establish minimum qualifications, to advertise those minimum standards, and then accept the first minimally qualified applicant. Dubbed the "first-in-time" rule, the ordinance...

Already slammed with allegations over misuse of private information, Facebook now must confront another legal challenge, this time over allegedly discriminatory policies involving rental housing ads. Four fair housing advocates have filed a federal lawsuit against the...

South Dakota lawmakers have passed a new measure designed to discourage renters from passing off pets as companion animals. The state is one of more than a dozen -- most recently Colorado, Massachusetts and Virginia -- to tackle the problem of fraudulent service...

Most landlords understand the value of screening tenants before handing over possession of an asset worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. But it's not always clear what, exactly, a landlord should be looking for when running a tenant background check. Here's an easy...

In a perfect world, landlords could collect as much information as possible to adequately screen tenants and find the right renter for a property. Social media appears -- at least on the face of it -- to provide much of that information. The problem though, is that a...

B.C.'s Acting Information and Privacy Commissioner Drew McArthur has published a report following an investigation into what he says are privacy abuses by landlords within the province. The Commissioner compiled information from 13 landlords, along with informal...

Some landlords are lucky. They don't know what it's like to open the door of their rental unit and find a sea of hypodermic needles, holes in the walls, broken doors, running water, or strangers living in the property. A landlord who profits from a tenant despite the...