There are times when you are unable to pay your house rent on time—perhaps the Coronavirus hit you hard, or you have other debts that demand to be paid first. Regardless of the reason for not paying your rent on time, you may ask yourself, “What happens if I don’t pay my rent?”
In this article, we’ll dig deeper into the topic of what happens if you don’t pay your rent and how many months can you go without paying rent before you are evicted.
The Coronavirus pandemic has left the entire world in a state of a mess. In addition to the health crisis, most countries are facing economic fallouts, and countless have lost their jobs. In such a situation, many countries have imposed eviction bans on rental properties so that people who are already facing financial crises aren’t left without the shelter of their homes.
The same happened in Canada, where the government imposed eviction bans on landlords, asking them to support their tenants in this difficult time. However, there is a limit to these bans, and the end of the eviction ban varies with the different territories in Canada.
You may have asked yourself, “If I don’t pay rent what will happen?”
When you miss your rent payment, your tenant may give you a ‘pay or quit’ notice. This is an official document that you may receive from your tenant when you miss your payment. Your landlord will mention the date they expect to receive the late rent before they take the next step and file a lawsuit in the municipal court.
Your landlord has to mention the date they expect to receive the late rent in full, giving you some time in the payment. Depending on the local or state laws, this timeline may be from 3 to 14 days.
Let’s suppose you arrange the money for the rent with the help of a private lender before the deadline and pay your landlord the amount in full plus the late fees. If your landlord accepts this payment—and they have to—the eviction process is dismissed.
When you pay your landlord the rent plus late fees in full before the deadline ends, they have to accept the amount, and cannot file anything against you in court.
If unfortunately, you are unable to pay for the rent before the deadline ends, your landlord can begin the eviction process. They may begin to file a lawsuit against you in the court, start gathering evidence, and prepare the eviction case in the court.
Your landlord cannot evict you before ending your tenancy. The Notice to End your Tenancy mentions when your landlord wants you to move out of the property. Your landlord needs to provide you with the notice some days before the due date. Usually, for owing rent, the deadline is 14 days, or seven days if you paid your rent by the day or by the week if the amount is arranged.
There may also be notices that tell that you may nullify the notice if you paid your rent.
You may decide to move out after you get a notice from your landlord. However, if you don’t, your landlord may apply to the Landlord and Tenant Board to get an eviction order. Once your landlord applies to this Board, they will send you:
Even though there are various kinds of applications regarding eviction, usually, it is named as’ Application to End a Tenancy’ or ‘Application to Evict a Tenant’.
The Board then schedules a hearing to evaluate if there is appropriate evidence for evicting you. One of the Board’s members takes charge of the hearing. In the hearing, you may explain why the Board shouldn’t evict you and bring evidence.
It is important to mention here that your presence at the hearing is crucial. If you decide to not go to the hearing, it will probably take place without you. If this happens, the Board may decide to finally evict you because they never got to hear your side of the story.
Therefore, it is important to show up at the hearing and present your reasons and evidence to the court. Moreover, it is better for you to get legal help at this point, as it is quite difficult for a layman to understand the complicated processes of the court.
At the hearing, your landlord will provide the Board with legal reasons to evict you. You may challenge or question the evidence or witnesses your landlord produces at the hearing. Moreover, you also have the right to explain your reasons, produce your evidence or witnesses. Furthermore, the Board has to see if your landlord has been following the tenancy agreement.
In some cases, the Board would not evict you even if there is a legal cause of evicting you. These scenarios include:
Therefore, it is crucial that you let the Board know what you want them to consider while deciding to evict you. You may even jot down points before the hearing so that you don’t forget anything. Moreover, bring all the evidence to the hearing; all the witnesses, recordings, work orders, reports, letters, or other documents that you believe will help your position at the hearing.
In case the Board gives an eviction order against you while you are not willing to leave, you have to do something about it. If the Board held the hearing and the decision went against you because the Board considered your landlord’s words, or because you did not appear at the court, you may ask for a review by appealing in the court. Otherwise, you would have to accept the court’s word and evict the property.
Getting an eviction order can be one of the most frightening of things. However, you may still avoid eviction if you pay the landlord the rent and the late fees in full before the deadline. In this article, we talked about the eviction status during the Coronavirus pandemic, what happens when you don’t pay the rent, the timeline of the notice, the eviction notice and the timeline for moving out, what happens when you don’t move out, the hearing, and some of the ways you may get the decision to side with you.
The entire process is complicated, frustrating, and time-consuming. The best way to get out of this mess is to get a private loan to pay off the rent. Private loans are quick processing, give you good rates, get you out of debt, and save your time!
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