Tenant creates a nightmare for couple
Tenant turns a family dwelling into a rooming house while owners away
I’ve always considered myself an unusually lucky person when it comes to real estate.
My student apartment in Montreal was all exposed brick and high ceilings. As an intern in Toronto, I shared the full top floor in a downtown warehouse. When I first left Canada with my husband, our Jerusalem apartment had a sweeping view of the Old City.
Remarkably, nothing changed when we moved back to Canada in 2009. The financial meltdown had temporarily sobered the lunacy of Toronto’s housing market. We bought the first and only place we looked at — a charming red-brick Victorian on Lakeview Ave.
Then, sort of suddenly, we were leaving again. Last summer, my husband accepted a new job in Doha, Qatar. The inevitable calculus of what to do with our house — sell it or rent it — seemed simple. House prices in our neighbourhood had soared and if we sold now and returned to Canada, would we be able to afford to buy what we had again? Probably not.
So we listed our home with a reputable real estate agency for $4,000 a month. They soon came back with what looked like a great tenant: Jesse Gubb worked in sales and drove a Range Rover. His rental application showed a solid income and high credit rating. He listed himself, his girlfriend, brother and father as the occupants of the house. “Family is moving back together,” he said.
We signed the lease with Gubb and forged ahead with our new lives. That was the day our luck ran out. In the beginning, nothing seemed amiss. Gubb’s rent cheques cleared. Over email he struck all the right notes: polite, responsible, diligent.
But within a few months we would learn Gubb didn’t live in our house. Instead, he had converted our four-bedroom semi into an illegal rooming house and was subletting to as many as 16 people.
The news came in an email last March from our friend Sarah Fulford, editor of Toronto Life magazine. She had received a pitch about the rise of the rooming house in the city’s tight rental market. The writer, Kat Shermack, had visited a number of them, apparently run — and owned — by the same guy. But a property title search at city hall revealed otherwise. All the homes actually belonged to other people, mostly married couples, many of whom lived out of town.
And then this: “Your Lakeview house, and your names, came up on the search,” Fulford wrote.
We thought there must have been some mistake. When I phoned Shermack, she confirmed the man who took her on a tour of the rooming houses was, indeed, Gubb and one of the houses he was renting out was ours — for $550 a month per person.
Shocked, I pulled out Gubb’s rental application and did some digging. I couldn’t find any record of the employer he listed. The more I delved, the more his rental application claims unravelled. But how would we get rid of him?
“You need to hire the Terminator.”
This was the advice a colleague offered when I told him what I was facing. It’s the nickname earned by April Stewart, a 47-year-old paralegal. “People say I’m a mix of a bloodhound, a cop and Erin Brockovich,” she told me over the phone. She had me at hello.
It took several weeks for a private investigator Stewart had enlisted to document the damage Gubb had done to our house — including erecting walls to cram in more than a dozen young women.
Stewart wrote those women telling them that we — not Gubb — were the rightful owners. Toronto Fire Services was informed Gubb was operating an illegal rooming house.
A subsequent inspection logged nine violations in the house — for which we, as the owners, were fined $50,000. (Thankfully those charges were later dropped because of our co-operation.)
By that time, Gubb knew we were on to him. He sent me a series of emails alternately claiming nothing was amiss and threatening legal action against us.
When another fire inspection came up, he had a plan in place. He convened a meeting of all the occupants of our home and told them they should make it look like there were only three people in the house.
“So basically, you want us to lie?” one of the occupants asked. “Yeah,” he replied.
That conversation was recorded, and sent to the Toronto Landlord & Tenant Board.
In the end, Gubb didn’t put up much of a fight. By May, everyone had left the house. By June, we had restored it to its original state. In July, we found new tenants — a lovely family that had moved from British Columbia.
I’m aware our ordeal falls firmly into the category of first world problems. We have the good fortune to own a house to rent out in the first place. And, of course, we’re probably not Gubb’s only victims: Shermack found at least three other homes where Gubb was allegedly operating the same scheme.
Gubb was greedy, yes, we figured he made about $4,000 a month in profits from our house, but he was taking advantage of an opportunity created by a mad, mad market. Perhaps what’s most depressing is this generation of renters simply doesn’t have the same luck my generation did. What Gubb offered wasn’t just their best option. In some cases it was their only one.