Anonymised, illustrative composite. The eviction notice and the new rental listing came from the same file, months apart — and that timeline was the whole case.
At a glance
A landlord served a tenant paying $1,400 a month with an N12, stating that an adult child needed to move into the unit. The notice met the mechanics on its face: at least 60 days’ notice, timed to the end of a rental period, with one month’s compensation paid by the termination date as the notice required. The tenant, without the resources to contest it, moved out on schedule.
The unit was never occupied by the landlord’s child. Five months after the tenant moved out, the same brokerage that had helped process the N12 paperwork was retained again — this time to list the unit for rent on the open market, at $2,100 a month. Under LTB Interpretation Guideline 12, the test is whether it is “more likely than not the landlord or family member will move into the unit within a reasonable time after the unit becomes vacant,” and the same guideline states plainly that “the motives of the landlord in seeking possession of the rental unit are largely irrelevant” — only genuine intent to occupy matters. Re-listing for rent at a 50% premium within months is close to the clearest available evidence that the stated intent was never genuine.
$1,400 old rent versus $2,100 new asking rent — a $700-a-month gap, 50% above what the evicted tenant had been paying. Under the same interpretation guideline, a bad-faith finding on a T5 application can bring an increased-rent-differential award for up to one year — capped in this case at $700 × 12, or $8,400 — on top of general compensation not exceeding one year of rent paid, which on this tenancy would be $1,400 × 12, or $16,800, plus “an administrative fine not exceeding the monetary jurisdiction of the Small Claims Court,” currently $35,000 in Ontario.
IG12’s good-faith test does not ask whether the landlord had a plausible-sounding reason at the time the notice was served — it asks whether the intent was genuine and whether the family member actually moved in within a reasonable time after the unit became vacant. A landlord who instead re-lists the unit for rent, at a materially higher price, before any reasonable occupancy window has closed, has effectively supplied the Board with its own evidence that occupancy was never the real plan.
The former tenant filed a T5 application. The new rental listing itself — dated, priced, and run through the same brokerage that had handled the N12 — became the central exhibit; the landlord had no occupancy evidence to offer against it, no moving records, no utility transfer, nothing showing the child had ever lived there. The tenant, who found alternate housing within about seven months, based the differential claim on that period: seven months at the $700 monthly gap comes to $4,900, within the one-year statutory ceiling on that remedy, with moving and storage costs as a further recognized category of compensation on top of it.
The brokerage’s own file, once produced, showed the exact sequence: the N12 filing, the tenant’s move-out date, and the new listing intake form, all within the same five-month window and all handled by the same listing coordinator — a timeline that needed no interpretation once it was laid out in order.
If the child had genuinely moved in and stayed the occupancy period the notice implied, there would be no T5 exposure at all — the entire remedy structure only activates on a finding of bad faith, and a landlord who does exactly what an N12 says will happen has nothing to answer for. The cost here was entirely self-inflicted by the timeline: the same brokerage relationship that processed the eviction turning around, within months, to monetize the vacancy is what converted a routine eviction into a bad-faith finding.
The tell was structural, not behavioural: the same brokerage handling both the N12 paperwork and, a few months later, the new rental listing on the same unit creates exactly the paper trail an LTB adjudicator is looking for on a T5 application. An agent asked to relist a unit shortly after facilitating a landlord’s-use eviction on it is looking at the strongest possible evidence against their own former client — and arguably should be asking questions about genuine occupancy before taking that new listing at all.
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