Laundry, parking and other services are left to landlord and tenant to arrange
Q: I live in a small apartment building containing four rental units and a unit occupied by a landlord. There is a separate laundry room in the building. Two tenants have written clauses in their leases stating that they are permitted to use the laundry machines only on a specified day of the week. Is this way to set up access legal?
As well, the same two tenants are required to vacate their on-site parking spaces, with no reduction in rent, when overnight on-street parking becomes legal. This appears to be a violation of the Residential Tenancies Act. How should these tenants proceed to rectify this?
A: The Residential Tenancies Act (“RTA”) does not specify what services have to be included in a tenancy agreement. There is a set of rules that regulate what, if any, rent reduction is to take place if a service is removed. However, those rules do not apply to the question of what services are included in the rent when the original tenancy agreement is made. What a landlord and a tenant agree to include as services with a rental apartment is largely up to them, as is the rent when the apartment is rented to a new tenant.
As well, the RTA does not require that all tenants in a building be provided with identical services. The most common example is that parking is often rented to tenants based on what they need: some have no parking space, while others may rent one or two parking spaces.
The municipalities also do not regulate what laundry services are to be provided. They may make some regulations about parking, but do not dictate what is to be included in new tenancies.
Many rental units in small buildings are rented without any laundry service. Even in large buildings, there is no requirement that a landlord provide a laundry service, although many do, as a convenience to the tenants of the building.
You do not say whether the other two tenants have agreements allowing unlimited access to the laundry machines or no access to the laundry machines. Either is allowed by the RTA.
Living in the building, the landlord may want unfettered use of the laundry machines for themselves on the other five days. It may be that the landlord’s family could not do their laundry when they wanted to, due to all four tenants wanting to do their laundry when they want to.
Designating days might be a way of preventing conflicts between the various tenants about who can use the laundry machines when. For example, if two tenants both want to use the machines on Thursday between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m., then one of them will not be able to do so. Instead, by agreeing to designated days, tenants would know when the machines will be available to them.
With respect to parking, the issue is similar to the laundry issue. A landlord and a tenant can legally enter into a tenancy agreement in which the tenant has on-site parking when overnight street parking is banned, but does not have on-site parking when overnight street parking is allowed. It seems likely that was done as a favour to those two tenants, providing a parking space when on-street parking is not available.