Are you coming to Vancouver for the first time? Is English your second language? Then this article is for you. Well, rather than an article, it’s a glossary of terms we would like you to be familiar with.
You would be surprised to see how many terms in a renting-related conversation you wouldn’t understand. So, we decided to run an experiment. A couple of us got together and searched for a home using only the information we had when we got to the country many years ago. The objective? To find how many terms or rent-related items we knew nothing of and clarify them for you!
We started by browsing through Craigslist (because we didn’t know any better) and saw that there were apartments, basements and houses for rent. But then came across townhouses and laneway houses. What the hell are those? - We thought.
Townhouse - Think of it as a small, vertical house. These are homes that are built in a small piece of land and therefore have the kitchen on the ground floor, the living room on the first floor, and a bedroom and bathroom on the second floor. Weeeiiirrrddd
Laneway house - Someone who owns a house transformed their garage (behind the house) into a house with one or two bedrooms. So it’s like a little house that faces an alley, instead of a street.
Once we solved that mystery, we went on to read the listing descriptions. There was information about the square footage, how many washrooms, rooms, and heating. Then, there was a sentence that read: “utilities included”. Utilities??
Utilities - services within the home. These include water, electricity, and gas. ⚠️Warning ⚠️Internet is not a utility.
After sending some requests, we received a couple of replies saying we needed to provide references and pay a security deposit if we wanted to rent the place. Finally, asking if we were ok with them running a credit check.
References - A list of people they can contact to ask about you. A personal reference can be someone you work with or a family member. If you have rented before, it’s better if you give them the number of the person that rented to you before.
Security deposit - Money that you pay together with your first month’s rent. This money is kept by the owner and used for repairs if they find you damaged the home while renting. If you did not damage anything, they give you this money back. In British Columbia, the security deposit is a maximum of half of one month’s rent.
Credit check - They ask a company to pull information from your credit history. They want to see if you owe money to a bank or any other company. If you owe a lot of money the probability of you paying rent is less, right? ⚠️Warning ⚠️This will lower your credit score for a couple of months.
And that’s as far as our experiment went because we can’t go renting a house for the sake of an article! However, we can tell you the rest based on experience.
Once you decide on a place, you will have to sign the contract. That is the day when you give your security deposit to the landlord. After that, you will receive the keys to the property when you pay your first month’s rent. There are 4 popular ways to pay your rent: cash (not the best), post-dated cheques, transfers, and automatic withdrawals.
Cash - Not the best because this normally means your landlord might not be paying taxes for renting their home. Make sure you always ask for a receipt from them so you can justify you have been paying if something ever goes wrong.
Post-dated cheques - You will have to get a chequebook from the bank and write 12 cheques for your landlord (one for every month of the year). The dates on each cheque need to be the first day of each month (Jan 1, Feb 1, Mar 1, and so on). With this, your landlord will cash in your cheque at the beginning of each month.
Transfers - Canada has Interac transfers, which are basically money transfers that you can quickly do from the banking app on your phone. If this is the method, your landlord will give you an email to which you have to send the money.
Automatic withdrawals - For this, you will need to go into your banking app and download a void cheque. This normally happens if you are renting from a company that wants to do pre-authorized debit payment plans with you as a tenant. Therefore, after you give this form, they will program their system to automatically deduct the rent from your debit account at the beginning of each month. Fewer worries for you, but make sure you have the money in your account!
I think that’s enough for you to understand the renting process a little better. Remember that if you have additional questions, you can join our community on Slack and ask us and many more students all the questions you want. We’ll be more than happy to support you!
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