A Vancouver-based property management firm must pay two former North Shore tenants more than $140,000, a B.C. Supreme Court judge has ruled, after the landlord failed to move into the home they were evicted from.
According to the written ruling, Penelope and William White began renting the West Vancouver home in Sept. 2019 for $13,000 a month (though that was later reduced to $10,000). They signed their lease with Coldwell Banker Prestige Realty, which acted as agent for the owner Jingyi Zeng.
In January 2022, a Coldwell Banker employee called the Whites and told them the property’s owner was having a tax issue and needed to sell the house, the ruling notes, but Penelope was pregnant at the time and the Whites did not want to leave.
The Whites disputed the eviction, arguing it was being done in bad faith since the employee “had already made it clear the owner wanted to sell the property, and the owner didn’t even live in Canada, so was unlikely to move into the property,” Justice Maegen Giltrow acknowledged from the Whites affidavit in the dispute.
The Whites moved out in September 2022, finding a new home in West Vancouver, but they kept tabs on their former rental. After seeing that it remained empty for several months, they took the matter to the Residential Tenancy Branch, which ruled in their favour, ordering Coldwell Banker to pay $120,000 in compensation for the eviction, plus another $15,061 to repay the Whites for emergency repairs to the home’s boiler system, along with the return of their $13,000 damage deposit.
Coldwell Banker asked that the branch instead require the homeowner to cover the costs, which the arbitrator denied because Coldwell Banker “is the party named as the landlord on the written tenancy agreement.”
Coldwell Banker then took the matter to B.C. Supreme Court for judicial review, seeking a court order to have the arbitrator’s decision set aside or sent back to the RTB for reconsideration, this time naming Zeng, the homeowner, as the respondent.
The property management firm is not a “landlord” as defined under the act, they argued.
But Giltrow acknowledged there are differing definitions for landlord in different sections of the law. And when the eviction itself was under dispute and through the RTB process, Coldwell Banker never suggested that the owner should be named as a respondent.
“Having exercised and defended its authority to end the tenancy under s. 49, it is surprising that Coldwell Banker now argues that it is not a landlord for the purpose of ending a tenancy under s. 49,” she wrote.
It was only after the arbitrator issued the monetary order that the firm sought to have the matter corrected, which the arbitrator rejected.
There was also the practical matter of the Whites having no direct contact with the home’s owner.
“The [Act] does not provide a mechanism by which tenants can identify and correspond with or serve owners with whom they have not directly contracted,” she wrote, adding that putting the burden on tenants to “chase” owner-landlords would be “unjust, and inconsistent with the legislative scheme” to protect against unlawful evictions.
“Coldwell Banker provided a service to the owner by contract, to enter directly into a tenancy, provide the sole and only contact as landlord to the tenants throughout that tenancy, and to terminate that tenancy under the provisions of the [Act]. Coldwell Banker was remunerated for that service by the owner,” Giltrow wrote. “As the arbitrator said in her reasons dismissing Coldwell’s request for correction, the liability as between Coldwell Banker and the owner is best determined as a private law matter between those parties in these circumstances.”
