Having a great paralegal in your corner who knows the law, systems and nuances of real estate investing can make all the difference. Being proactive and understanding what they need ahead of time, might negate certain actions being needed, will reduce stress and potentially make the whole process smoother.
Join Andrew Choubeta of Choubeta Legal Services as they help you understand the best way to work with a paralegal and always have one ready in your corner when needed.
Sarah: The pandemic has obviously complicated things further with virtual tenant board meetings and in generally longer process and paperwork. It's definitely very easy to make some mistakes that could cost a lot of time and thousands of dollars. Having a great paralegal in your corner who knows the law, systems and nuances of real estate investing can make all the difference. Tonight, Andrew helps us understand the best way and when to work with a paralegal. Andrew, welcome.
Andrew: Let's start from the top. I am a licensed paralegal in Ontario and I primarily work in the pesky lovely field of Landlord Tenant Board law. Most of the time centered around tenant evictions and Typically work in this type of work here. You'll see your nice notice to end your tenants and tenancy for renovation, demolition, repair, and convert to another usage and thirteens as they're typically called for renovations. And then from there, I deal with a broad spectrum and that's, you're enforced, you're not given a rent.
Every investor should have known this. Of course all things considered. It should always be something in their mind. Unfortunately. For, notice and your tendency interfering damages, et cetera, et cetera. And then from there, of course illegal acts, agreements, contracts, and everything else between non paralegal fields now, what's it like working with a paralegal?
Working with paralegals is typically done. If you have an issue in regards to non-payment of rent, we are helping start. From there, if you are an investor focused, if you're looking at a new BRRRR, flip or that type of thing, our office is traditionally brought on for N13s. Notice for tenancy which typically goes for about 120 days, this type of practice. I know there's quite a few individuals that have been in a position of either non-payment or rent or either through an issue with damage to a property, et cetera. They've had to enlist our services to remove the tenant while unfortunately going through that practice is incredibly time consuming and it's quite difficult to go through your emotional or logistical.
They rely on our practice to deal with the issue as it goes forward. Landlords were locked, and didn't really follow the rules usually, unfortunately. When you go to the board, we're typically seeing 40, 50 matters going up on the docket. It's incredibly time consuming to deal with. Having a licensed paralegal, someone in your corner that knows what they're doing and can handle these matters for you is incredibly important. I will typically move away from suggesting individuals handle these things on their own. Practitioners typically will come for investors and come forward to our office in reverse. Unfortunately, you tried to do something on your own.
If I can give you a direct example, the only things I really suggest for an investor to do, or at least try on won't at least once is something like this. They're not paying rent, which I started with. It's notice you're on tenancy. Every investor should know what this says. There's no reason to not know what this is. Everyone should know it. I'll actually go through with how you can do this on your own real quickly. It's just the name of the tenant, the landlord's name, the address, the rental unit, the amounts that are in arrears. And then from there, this must be a termination date, at least 14 days from the date you issue it plus five days of you're sending up the postage and then your rental period columns to charge the payments, the owing, et cetera, and then everything else in between.
If you're a representative you can see my office information here as well. Now, everyone should know how to do this, submit it, send it to the board of yourself. I suggest even still an investor, shouldn't go down the road of doing the eviction themselves, or even trying to do the hearing themselves, still observe and definitely go into the Landlord and Tenant Board matters and see, and just listen after hearing a few hearings. You know exactly what's going on and what you can expect when you retain someone's services on what to see and what will eventually happen.
You can see exactly where they go wrong and what type of applications are successful and ones are not. The best thing you can do inside these cases is move away from taking on these matters on your own. That is something that you need to do. Now from there, when should you actually have a practitioner come along and fives and six, and then from there N13s. These are the bread and butter of most paralegal offices. N13s, primarily being something that I specialize in. What does N13 look like? And when you should start working with the paralegal before you close your day. Always, typically speaking, when you're just done with your mortgage broker and you're just putting often on the property.
We like to know exactly what has happened when it's happening, when you're planning on closing the property. When are you planning on closing on your investments. We do that so we can get your rent, roll and performer and everything else in between so inline, before it goes to the closing, and then we can do an immediate cash for keys or request that we speak with attendees right after the closing goes through and we do this. We can minimize that time where you're like, It is waiting on updates in regards to when the property is going to be better, reach for demo, even your BRRRR strategy, whatever your plan on doing with that property and you're looking to see a capital gain for your cap rates and our office still it's eight staff.
It's important that we know beforehand before the matter goes forward, simply because these could be 16 unit buildings, could be three unit buildings, or they can be a hundred unit buildings, and there's a lot of paperwork to get through all of that. It certainly starts something you want to redo all over again. It was important that they know beforehand. What are the sort of timeframes with the Landlord and Tenant Board and then paralegal matters? That's the big question I get nearly every single day. I find our office typically does about 400 matters per week that are brought on.
We do work all over the GTA. We work in Hamilton, Ontario, Toronto, Ottawa for clients that are out in Hong Kong that sort of have investments all over Ontario. We deal with farmland, commercial. We deal with quite a few things. The number one thing I tell everybody is if you're dealing with an investor. If you're dealing with investments, if you're dealing with real estate, you're going to be the Landlord Tenant Board at some point in time. It is going to take a long time. If your investment is in Scarborough, it could be upwards to a year. If you're just doing a non-payment of rent, even something as urgent as not being rental could still take a year.
If you're doing something like N13, they can take a very long time. Having a practitioner that knows what they're doing and removing tenants for an eviction, certain this manner dealing with negotiations. I don't like to say it's cash for keys because that is not what it is. Cash for keys is a very specific thing that's brought in before litigation. Typically, I tell individuals, if you're trying to catch the keys only do it after you, something that I've actually noticed. You're actually doing a negotiation. It's not something that could be seen as coercion or anything like that.
If you plan on doing something with the property, either a renovation, demolition, someone's moving in, or a friend, whichever it may be. You want to be doing that after you submit all the filings after the application, and if that's the case, you should only do it with a licensed paralegal or an individual that's a representative loss in Ontario, namely speaking, or a lawyer as well. Those are the times that you'll be utilizing those things. If you're looking for a quick takeaway of when you're done, and you're looking over this seminar again, you want to be looking at your N4s, N5s, N6s. Do you want to know how to do these things and work with your paralegal?
There's a lot of investors that will do their own notice forms themselves and then have a paralegal move on a matter once it goes to a point where they can't handle it on their own. Learning how to do that first notice form basis and having people actually do the application for you afterwards is incredibly important. Some of the things I wanted to show you in regards to working with a paralegal. We do have an agreement that I wanted to bring up. This is the difference between cash for keys and what a paralegal will do. This is traditionally what you'll see for cash. This was one of the agreements I typically used to use back in.
When I first started practicing, it's not rudimentary, it still works. It's bang for your buck. That's exactly what you need to do. I typically handed out for free to a lot of investors. It's a nondisclosure agreement to not contact the properties, completely vacate the property. There's a sheriff clause affirmation in regards to personal items being destroyed. If the property, if this is left behind and then from there, tenant acknowledgements in a compensation package, if you're planning on doing it and then of course your own level is initials and signatories. What a paralegal will do is something closer to this, which is the full and final settlement agreement.
It's quite a lot more expensive and it's a lot more particular terms. From there, when you're doing exactly what I'm doing with you're looking at a release, which is anywhere between 30 to 45 pages long. That's what you typically use to close out that liability behind you. N13 will have something like first rights back. Do you want to close off the liability after it's completed and only doing a release was going to do that. Cash for keys still works, but it's rare. Cash for keys is a rudimentary way of doing the release. And these days now with a lot more notification to change the law, it's just not feasible to think that it will work so often. It's a shoot miss and if it misses, then you run the risk of having some severe issues when you're dealing with the tenant, basically hostile to whatever you're trying to do either it's not be able to rent or it's and twelves.
Whatever the issue is, you don't want to have that negotiation window disappear on you and releases like this sort of close everything at the very end. You do have something called a full and final in the fall finals incredibly important. Usually when you go into a matter and you don't want it to spiral out of your control and you don't want it to continue needlessly going into litigation. I am very happy to speak with you guys.
If you guys are looking for any particular type of question, I'll still be around and you can let me know if you have any questions in regards to investments. If you're looking at how to remove the tenant as quickly as possible, either through a cash for keys or facilitated agreement, or you're looking to do your next rental, I just let me know and we can go from there, if you have any questions.
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