“It makes me so sad”: their old home is for rent on Airbnb

Montreal tenants are shocked to see their old apartments listed on the Airbnb website after agreeing to leave under pressure from owners who are increasing the number of ads on the tourist accommodation platform.

• Read also: One permit, three ads on Airbnb: it’s still easy to circumvent the law

• Read also: Parties, noise, fireworks: accommodation listed at $857 per night on Airbnb is disturbing in Verdun

“It hurts me so much. It was our house and now it has no personality. It says it can accommodate 14 people, but it could have been us if not a family,” breathes Justine Lepage-Roy who lived for a year and a half with her partner Frédéric Provost in one of the apartments displayed.

The two young professionals, aged 26 and 29, saw themselves living in the big six and a half of the Ville-Marie borough for a long time when they moved in June 2020.

But the Ville-Marie triplex was bought in July 2021. They say the new owners sent them no fewer than two eviction notices in two months.

A price that explodes

Although they won their case before the Administrative Housing Tribunal (TAL) for the first, for subdivision, they preferred to leave in exchange for the sum of $10,000 when they received the second, for change of use.

“They kept telling us to leave and that they would never stop, that they would arrive more prepared. We were students, we had neither the time nor the resources to fight,” explains M^me Lepage-Roy.

Shortly after they left in March 2022, the place they paid $1,250 for was renting for $2,350 a month. It is now listed on Airbnb for as much as $730 a night, according to what we have seen. The newspaper.

One of the co-owners, Alexandre Gauvin, owns three other buildings in Montreal, including a sixplex in Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve that he purchased through a numbered company that he operates with Vadim Kuzmenko.

Pressures

Joannie Primeau lived in this building for over a year. Her former apartment is now listed on Airbnb.

“It was hell,” says the one who also claims to have been pressured to terminate the lease.

In 2020, she contested an eviction notice for major works on the two-story seven-and-a-half-room apartment she shared for two years with three other roommates for $1,235 per month.

The file was still open at the Régie du logement when the owners began work on the business on the ground floor of the building, leaving their home at 13 degrees Celsius in the middle of winter.

It was following water damage that they agreed to close their file at the TAL in exchange for compensation of $4,448 for three months’ rent, loss of use of the accommodation and relocation compensation according to the agreement of which The newspaper got a copy.

“It had become uninhabitable. […] We were so tired and anxious that we accepted,” laments ^Mme They were getting

Reached by telephone to give his version of events, Alexandre Gauvin said he had “no comment.” Vadim Kuzmenko did not respond to our requests.