I would have never rented the apartment if I had been told that the landlord intended to list it for sale. This started off slowly. The tenants were given a written notice sometime in the winter that an “investors group” was going to be touring the building. I had no clue what this meant. At that point I was still assuming good faith on the part of the owner. Since he was a realtor, and owned property in Toronto, I figured this was some wheeling and dealing thing he had going on. I made sure that my apartment was tidy and clean.
I remember the first was a group of men, that came in the evening. They clomped through my apartment in their wet winter boots. I spied through my curtains as I observed the owner taking them up the very precarious and unlit fire escape, to show them the back of the building, in the dark. The back of the building was in especially bad shape. The porch on the third floor had pulled away from the building’s wall by at least 3″, and many of the exposed wood portions were obviously rotten. There were giant holes in the soffits, sagging beams and many other obvious issues.
At some point I looked at Realtor.ca and saw that the building was now listed for sale, yet none of the tenants had been told. This was only going to get worse.
Black Picket Fence 