secrets Victoria’s

Debbie Piete was delighted when she found the perfect tenants for a house she owned in Prince George.

The professional working couple with two young kids seemed like a landlord’s dream: Problem-free tenants who would take good care of the property.

But a few Easter Sundays ago, just as she was getting set to serve holiday dinner for a large family gathering, she got an unexpected phone call.

“It was the RCMP,” Piete told me. “They said they raided the house the night before and discovered a large marijuana grow-op in the basement. I was shocked.”

For Piete, it was the start of a long and costly process to fix the damage in the house and hopefully rent it out again or sell it.

“The first thing you realize is your insurance is void because it doesn’t cover criminal activity,” she said. “I was on the hook for everything.”

That included gutting the basement of the home, repairing the damage and remodelling.

Then there was extensive testing required to ensure the home’s air quality was safe and there was no danger from mould, pesticides or unsafe modifications to the home’s electrical system.

After racking up a bill of $35,000 — not including all the forgone rental income she lost while the home was empty — the house was once again safe to live in.

But now the property had a stigma attached to it. When the house was put up for sale, Piete was required to disclose its history as a drug house on mandatory property-condition reports.

“The value of the house goes down,” she said. “And the reports must be filed with the bank, who are then reluctant to finance the property purchase.”

Marijuana grow-op houses are a common problem around the province and can be a nightmare for the both buyer and the seller of the home.

For property owners victimized by a dope-growing tenant, there may be a temptation to keep the home’s drug history a secret, said Chilliwack realtor Kim Parley.

“That’s a really bad idea,” he said. “You could have a situation where someone buys a home and then the neighbours tell them, ‘Gee I’m surprised you bought this place because it was a grow-op.’ The seller could be in a lot of legal trouble. It can get really ugly.”

Now that marijuana is legal in Canada, the situation could get even more confusing and risky for buyers and sellers, warns Trevor Hargreaves, vice-president of government relations with the B.C. Real Estate Association.

“The landscape has changed dramatically,” Hargreaves said, pointing to new federal regulations that make it legal for people to grow up to four marijuana plants in their home.

“You have one level of government saying it’s OK and legal now to grow cannabis and then a patchwork of municipal governments all with different rules and regulations about how marijuana grow-op homes must be reported and remediated.

“And then you have a provincial government with no standardized regulations for the whole province. There’s an urgent need here for clear policy guidelines.”