Anonymised, illustrative composite. A tenant, upset about a sale, refused every showing request on their rental home. The rule that resolved it was procedural, not persuasive.
At a glance
A landlord listed a tenanted single-family home in Ottawa at $625,000. The tenant, unhappy about the sale and worried about their own tenancy, refused the agent’s first showing request outright, then the second, then a third over the following two weeks.
The landlord assumed the tenant simply had no legal right to interfere with a sale and asked the agent to push harder for access. The agent’s instinct instead was to check the paperwork behind each request before treating the tenant as the one in the wrong.
The listing agent had been giving verbal heads-up calls before each showing rather than formal written notice — a courtesy, not a legal notice under the Residential Tenancies Act. The tenant’s refusals, technically, were being made against requests that had never actually triggered the Act’s entry rules in the first place.
Ontario’s Landlord and Tenant Board sets out the entry rules in its own Interpretation Guideline 19: a landlord, or with the landlord’s written authorization a broker or salesperson registered under the Real Estate and Business Brokers Act, 2002, may enter a rental unit to show it to a potential purchaser, provided at least 24 hours’ written notice is given stating the reason, the date, and a time of entry between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.
Asking price $625,000. Three showings refused over two weeks under informal notice. Once the agent switched to compliant written notice, a 21-day delay separated the first refused request from the first showing that actually went ahead. The eventual accepted offer, $609,000, landed $16,000 — 2.56% — under the original asking price, a gap the listing agent attributed in part to the lost early momentum of the first three weeks on market.
The notice requirement itself carries no discretion: 24 hours, written, and a stated window between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. — the same bright-line test regardless of how many times a tenant has already said no. None of the first three verbal heads-up calls met that standard, which meant the tenant’s first three refusals were never actually tested against the rule that would have made them improper.
Once the agent began serving proper written notice — 24 hours ahead, with the date and an 8 a.m.-to-8 p.m. window stated — the tenant’s legal footing changed. Interpretation Guideline 19 is explicit: “A tenant does not have the right to deny entry simply because the time of entry is not convenient to the tenant,” and the tenant must not interfere with the landlord’s or its agent’s right of entry once the notice requirements are met. A sister source states the same rule for this exact fact pattern in plainer terms: “Yes, if the landlord gives twenty-four hours’ written notice stating the date and a time between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. The tenant does not have to consent and does not have to be present.”
The tenant’s consent was never the legal precondition — the landlord’s (or authorized agent’s) compliant notice was. That is the entire mechanic the case turned on.
The agent stopped relying on courtesy phone calls and began serving RTA-compliant written notices for every showing, with a copy kept on file. Once the tenant was shown, in writing, that refusing a properly noticed entry was not a right they actually had, showings from the fourth notice onward proceeded without further incident — no application to the Landlord and Tenant Board was ever needed.
For the tenancy that survives a sale in the first place, see the vacant possession glossary entry, and for the narrower route to end a tenancy for an incoming buyer’s own use, the N12 notice glossary entry.
The mirror-image risk sits on the landlord’s side of this rule, not just the tenant’s. Interpretation Guideline 19 also states that a landlord who makes unnecessary or unreasonable entries, or who does not respect the notice rules, can be found by the Board to have interfered with or harassed the tenant, or to have substantially interfered with the tenant’s reasonable enjoyment of the unit — a finding a tenant can bring against the landlord. Had this agent pushed for entry without proper notice, rather than fixing the paperwork, the legal exposure would have run the other way.
The tell was in the agent’s own file, not the tenant’s attitude: the first three refused requests had never actually been served as RTA-compliant written notice. A tenant’s refusal is only clearly improper once the landlord’s own notice is airtight — 24 hours, written, dated, timed. Checking that box first, before assuming a tenant is simply being difficult, is what actually resolved this file.
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