Vacation Rental vs Airbnb Permit

A major Montreal landlord is taking advantage of legal ambiguity to rent out student housing on Airbnb for the summer.

Newspaper He discovered this trick while checking out a particularly active Airbnb host in Montreal: Hayley.

In mid-June, it posted 17 ads for “prime residences” for rent, in buildings all owned by one owner: Immobilier Uliev.

14 different students applied for registration with the Ministry of Tourism, in exchange for a rental permit.

“that it [Yuliv] Who proposed this idea? “They rent to us and we don't pay the rent until we come back at the end of August,” explains one tenant who asked to remain anonymous because he still has a lease with Yuleef.

He and his roommates were forced to empty their apartment of their personal belongings and store them elsewhere.

• Listen to journalist Dominique Cambron-Jolet's explanations on QUB :

Income to the owner

“We don't hide it,” says Yuleef's president, Ali Farasat. It's a way for us to get more rent. Almost all students leave during the summer. “It's a benefit to them.”

He still admits that some tenants who have been granted permission will not return to their residences next September, because their lease “expires on August 31.”

Mr. Frasat asserts that he makes “little money” from these rentals because the host company, a management company, “takes 20%” of the income. He did not mention which company was behind Haley's file.

For his part, the student believes that Yuli should definitely earn more income from Airbnb rentals than regular rent.

“Otherwise they would have no reason to offer this to us,” he says.

He confirms that he does not receive any income from rents, even though it is officially his “primary residence.”

Not matching

A house in this plateau building belonging to Yuliv has been offered for rent on Airbnb as “primary accommodation” since 2023, after being removed from the platform for almost 4 years due to municipal regulations. Image by Dominique Cambron-Joliet, JDM / Screenshot taken from AIRBNB

Mr. Farasat believes there is nothing “illegal” about acting as a facilitator for student rentals on the platform.

“We went to the city with the tenants and they told us there was no problem because they live there,” he says.

But the elected official in charge of the housing file in the Plante administration, Benoit Duris, does not have the same opinion.

“It seems to me that this kind of business is not at all consistent with the law,” he says.

The elected official states that the Quebec government's goal in allowing you to rent your primary residence is to encourage the “co-operative economy.”

“If a company asks students to request CITQ numbers, so the landlord can rent on Airbnb. You are not in the co-op economy. Someone is doing business,” Mr. Doris believes.

Chloe St. Hilaire, a PhD student at the University of Waterloo who specializes in short-term rentals, points out that using a third party to manage cleaning or reservations is not directly regulated by Quebec law.

“The laws just say that you have to declare the income derived from your short-term rental,” she says.