I really don’t understand why the Landlord/Tenants Act does not have anything in it pertaining to life moving forward. My fiancée and I are moving into a house. We didn’t expect to buy a house this year, but an opportunity came up and we seized it. This has caused nothing but issues for us as we have not completed our one year apartment lease.

Our lease is with Meddco Properties (used to be York Property Management) and it basically says that if we don’t find someone to take over our apartment we have to pay a $500 fee. And if we do find someone to take over the apartment, we have to pay $250.

Update May 29, 12:01pm: It is not $250, it is $500, no matter what we do. The only difference is that if we find someone to take over the apartment, we won’t have to pay July’s rent another $650.

The worst part of this is that we began informing our superintendents about our plans to leave in late February. We continued to talk to them about it in April, and just a few weeks ago, in early May they hand us a form to break our lease which says that we have to give them 60 days notice.

Now I know that ignorance of the law is no excuse, but Sabine and I are in our early twenties. We have been doing our due diligence, we have paid our rent on time, and have been perfect tenants, even saying that we would do repairs on our own unit.

Repairs that should have been completed before we moved in. Our whole bathroom is unpainted, the carpet was put in incorrectly, and there are many other simple repairs that should have been done. We have put in requests, and verbally asked our superintendent a few times, with no action.

So to try not to have to give into this form, we have actively pursued finding someone to take over the apartment. We didn’t know that there was a fee between $250 and $500 to assign or sub-let the apartment to someone else. And so we looked high and low. We asked friends, placed the ad repeatedly on popular classifieds online, and put the advertisement in the paper. These things have cost us both time and money. Money which we didn’t have, but at the time we assumed we wouldn’t have to pay any fees if we found someone to take over the apartment.

One day reading our original lease we found a line saying that they can charge us up to $500 as an administration fee for doing criminal record checks and whatnot. One person in the office made no mention of such a fee when we talked to her, another person in the office said that the fee is $250, but our lease says up to $500.

The whole situation is very frustrating. Why should we be penalized for moving ahead in life?

Can they really make us pay another months rent? Is this the type of world that we live in, where good people get hurt by companies taking advantage of the laws?

Now you might think I am being unreasonable, but I am not. I will pay their $500 fee to terminate my lease, but I think the fact that they have known about us wanting to leave longer than 60 days means that we have already given the required notice. We didn’t know it needed to be in writing as they seemed fine with a verbal agreement. They never mentioned about any forms before this point, and now we are stuck.

We can’t afford our lease and our mortgage. And it doesn’t seem like they are going to be helpful or reasonable.

Our superintendent has asked us to contact Ed. Ed is the building owner as far as we know. Our continued attempts to contact him have lead only to his answering machine on both his cell phone, and his office phone. We have tried to be civil and work towards negotiating something, but it doesn’t seem like they care.

We are good people, and they know they will get money from us, and as a business that is all they care about.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, and if nothing else, letting the world know that Meddco Properties (or York Property Management) are unreasonable is a start.

Update May 29, 12:08pm: It has been suggested that Sabine and I seek out the Ontario Housing Tribunal, but that it will be a frustrating process that might not help us in this situation at all.

Their information is:
Southwestern Regional Office
150 Dufferin Avenue, Suite 400
London, Ontario N6A 5N6
1-888-377-8813

Update May 29, 12:49pm: Our builder just contacted us to let us know we can close on the house June 7th. This means we have to run around getting everything all set up. What a mess.

Some people that I have contacted have basically advised me that the law doesn’t leave any room for this type of problem, and that my best best would be to depend on the time/cost ratio for negating the chance that they’d take us to court over our remaining rent.

Sad that this is the best suggestion that people can come up with under the current legal system.

Some people have been wondering why this is such a big deal, and why we don’t just cave in, and give them every penny they ask for. Well, we would if we could, but honestly we have too much on our plate. Sabine and I are moving into a house we purchased, and two weeks later our first mortgage payment will be due. Currently, this looks like June 21st.

We are also getting married July 7th, and have transportation costs, food costs, photographer, wedding officiant and of course our Marriage license to pay for. Other than that, I just bought some new computer equipment for my business which I sorely needed, and won’t be able to write off until early next year, in my taxes. All these factors together have put us in a tight money situation, one we didn’t expect.

Update June 5, 7:19pm: I have posted a major update of how things are going over in a new post entitled More on Moving on With Life. Read it to keep up with this ever more frustrating story.