Rent and renovation Transcript practice

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innovation - while - unit - major - leak - maintain – notice - increase

Yuliya: You mentioned renovation, do they increase rent when they do those renovations?
Ralph: Yes, if the renovation is major, if it's like a really serious repair to the building or, for example, when they put that door into the basement, when they repaired all of the balconies and did repair work on all of the balconies, the company that owns the building, they apply to the government to raise the rent more than normal.

Normally the rent, the percentage of the rent is decided by the government of Ontario.

For this older building they decide the rate for all the rentals. It depends on inflation, so normally we're paying about maybe 2% more every year. But if they did major repair work, we could be paying 3.5% or one year we were paying 4% more, so that was not great. But they do the building really well. It's very clean.

Everything is by the book, so they're always following the rules exactly. When they want to enter your apartment, they give you the proper ahead of time. When they need to inspect things, they do all the inspections on time, and they let you know.

Recently they installed heat pumps. A heat pump is a type of heating and cooling unit. So in the past we just had baseboard heaters to heat the unit, and if you wanted to cool the you needed to buy a window air conditioner, but they installed new units in the wall, and these units are… they can heat the main room in the winter and they can cool it in the summer.

Yuliya: Can you control the temperature in your unit, in your room?
Ralph: Yes.
Yuliya: Oh, that sounds great!
Ralph: It’s an energy saving , energy saving device. And, so, they always seem to be doing those kinds of things. Of course, our rent is going to increase to pay for this. But, if we moved somewhere else, our rent would increase much much much more. We’ve lived here for a very long time, and when you move out of a unit, the new tenant has to pay a much higher rent. So if we moved, we would have to pay much higher rent. So we will probably stay here for a while.

Ralph: Ehh, it’s OK. It’s a bit old, but we did have some problems with our windows, and we had two windows replaced. They cracked, don’t know why. And we did have some water ing at one point, from a pipe, but they were very quick to fix that. So generally, pretty happy, we’ll see.

Yeah, it would be nice to have a washer and dryer in the unit, and it would be nice to have another bedroom, but our balcony is so great, and the light is so great, and the location is so great, that I think we’ll stay here for a .

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