Tenancy Law Changes coming
Over the past few years the BC government has implemented multiple changes to laws which affect the rental market. They are proposing multiple changes to BC tenancy laws in the near future.
One of the changes is the notice period required for landlords to provide a tenant when they want to re-occupy the unit for owner use. This would be required when a tenancy is on a month to month agreement. Previously the notice period for landlord use was two months. The government changed it, and increased the notice requirement to four months. They adjusted a portion of the notice period to three months which was only applied to purchasers of the property. This reduced the notice period to three months for people buying a tenanted property. For landlords wanting to move back into their own rented property it remained at four months notice.
This created some confusion in the market when providing notice to vacate a tenant.
The main reasoning behind reducing the notice to three months for new purchasers was banks don’t often provide more than three months for holding an interest rate for buyers searching for a new home, which was affecting the ability of purchasers to buy tenanted properties.
This week the government has announced it will change the legislation again, reducing the notice period for landlords from four months to three months, to align both of these notice periods. This means landlords and new buyers will both only need to provide the three month notice to move into the tenanted property.
They are also proposing changes to landlord requirements for tenants abandoned property. Currently when a tenant leaves property behind which was valued over $500 a landlord is required to hold these items for 60 days providing a tenant time to return and claim these items. The proposed changes are reducing the holding time from 60 days to 30 days and increasing the value amount from $500 to $1000.
One other change is they are planning to have the RTB publish monetary order decisions starting this summer. They are already publishing decisions of hearings held, I can only assume this is going to have more information and potentially details of the participants. This would be helpful to landlords if tenants have had issues with unpaid rent in the past. Another tool to verify a tenant’s suitability for renting a property.
All of these changes require the BC legislation to be changed so this will take some time before they are implemented.
https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2025HMA0027-000307
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