Real Estate Law Blog

Commercial landlords have, in the past year and a half, dealt with many novel issues in relation to COVID-19, often on an emergency basis. Few landlords have had to deal with both public health order violations and gang crime relating to the same tenant, as in a recent decision of the B.C. Supreme Court, Ivy Lounge West Georgia Limited Partnership v. TA F&B Limited Partnership,

Beginning in the fall of 2019, many strata owners in British Columbia saw their insurance premiums jump between 50% and 700% from the previous year, along with similar increases in their insurance deductibles. Although garnering less attention than the insurance crisis in the residential strata market, commercial landlords and tenants are also seeing significant ...

This blog post is further to our post on the B.C. government’s revised measures for residential landlords and tenants.

On July 16, 2020 the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing (the “Minister”) announced a framework for rent repayment once the ban on evictions for the non-payment of rent is lifted on September 1, 2020. A ministerial order implementing the ...

On June 24, 2020, the Minister of Public Safety issued a new ministerial order pursuant to the province’s Emergency Program Act relating to residential tenancies (the “New Order”). The New Order replaces the prior ministerial order dealing with residential tenancies, which we summarized in our blog here.

The New Order will impact Landlords and Tenants as follows:

On March 27, 2020, the Government of Alberta announced new measures to address residential tenancy issues arising during and as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Max Carroll and Jeffrey Hernaez of our Vancouver office wrote yesterday about similar measures put in place in British Columbia.

Pursuant to the Public Health Act (Alberta) and the Minister’s powers under the ...

On March 25, 2020, the Government of British Columbia announced a number of relief measures for residential tenants and landlords in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These measures are summarized in our blog post here.

On March 30, 2020, a Ministerial Order (the “Order”) pursuant to the province’s Emergency Program Act was made by the Minister of Emergency ...

As result of the closure of numerous businesses, rising unemployment and the general impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economy, it is expected that a number of residential tenants will not be able to pay rent or will request some rent relief from landlords. In order to address this, on March 25, 2020, the Government of British Columbia outlined the following restrictions ...

The ongoing global pandemic is currently having an enormous impact on commercial retailers, restaurants, and other commercial tenancies in, among other places, British Columbia and Alberta. We have recently seen a number of tenant defaults (or potential defaults depending on the wording of the relevant lease) which include failing to pay rent and closing down ...

Given its sometimes latent and often subterranean nature, environmental contamination and its associated legal liabilities can be challenging to foresee and may be overlooked by landlords and tenants in the process of entering a new lease. The Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act (EPEA), one of the key pieces of legislation in Alberta’s environmental ...

Over the past year, the Province has made several changes to the Residential Tenancy Act (the “RTA”) to provide new protections and compensation for renters in British Columbia who might otherwise face eviction as a result of repair, renovation or demolition of residential properties.

In this blog post, we first provide a summary of the changes to the RTA which have come ...