91 Hallam St, Toronto - N12 served then challenged at the LTB

My partner and I had been renting the 2nd floor apartment at 91 Hallam for four and a half years (since January 2011), when the house was sold in mid-April 2015. We met with the new landlord shortly after she took possession of the property and while she was fine with us staying on as tenants, she requested that we pay her an above-guideline rent increase and threatened to move in otherwise. At the time, we were paying $1283/month including a parking spot and she was asking for $1410/month without parking. (Unfortunately, the parking spot was something we'd agreed to verbally with our former landlord and had never formally signed a new lease that included it, so we lost the spot when the new landlord took possession.) Since $1410 was still a reasonable and competitive rent for a 1-bedroom at the time, we decided just to pay her extra since we really wanted to stay in our apartment.

Fast forward a year and a half. In February 2017, we were sent an N12 saying that our landlord needed to move into our unit at the end of our lease. She claimed that her parents were moving from China to her house in Oakville (which her parents supposedly owned) and so she needed to move into our apartment. We wanted to stay, but gave her the benefit of the doubt and agreed to look for a new place. We ended up finding a new apartment and served our landlord the N9 Notice to Terminate the Tenancy, which specified that we would be moving out on March 31, 2017.

On March 30, the day before our move, we found a listing on Kijiji advertising our apartment for rent on a 1-year lease for $2100/month + $50 utilities. (We were still paying $1410/month at this time.) A few days later, after our move, we noticed that the ad had been updated and reposted at $1950/month + $50 utilities, and this time included photos of the now empty apartment. Some friends of ours attended the advertised open house for the apartment, spoke with our landlord and audio recorded their conversations. They pretended to have been recently evicted themselves and asked her if she ever thought she might need to move in one day, to which she replied that she has her own house in Oakville and could never live in apartment like this (i.e. second floor of a 3-storey house) because she's a very light sleeper. In fact, she elaborated on this saying that she used to live downtown in a condo and even that was too noisy for her. When asked why the previous tenants decided to move out, she said "Oh, they found a better, uh, cheaper, place".

We brought all of this, along with additional evidence, to the LTB, but unfortunately, they ruled in favour of our landlord, who hired a really good lawyer who basically argued that she intended to move in, but that her circumstances just changed really quickly. The LTB said that despite all of the facts we presented, we didn't prove that she acted in bad faith. I'm not sure what more we could have done, but I basically have no confidence in the system now and am totally disheartened by the experience. (This was unfortunately just prior to the amendments to the Residential Tenancies Act, which took effect in April 2017 and placed the burden of proof on the landlord to disprove bad faith.)

Our old neighbours at 91 Hallam also had issues with this landlord threatening to increase their rent, not paying for radiator/heating repairs, etc. I would highly recommend avoiding this place unless you want to be stuck dealing with a greedy, lying, two-faced, unresponsive and unsympathetic landlord who is really just one of the worst people I've ever crossed paths with.