Rent Guarantees

In Ontario landlords can ask for a rent guarantee. It’s perfectly legal to ask a tenant to have a third party guarantee their rent will be paid.


Welfare and Disability will quite often send the rent portion of a tenants cheque directly to the landlord. This arrangement is not a rent guarantee because the tenant can change this at any time without notifying the landlord.

In the Human Rights Code, Regulation 290/98, 2. (1) A landlord may require a prospective tenant to obtain a guarantee for the rent. By requiring a rent guarantee the landlord is somewhat protected. I say somewhat protected because you still have to collect from the guarantor if the tenants fails to pay their rent.

As a landlord we are now going to be asking the majority, if not all of our new tenants to get a rent guarantee. In doing this if the tenant defaults on their rent payment we have another person we can legally go after for payment.

From April 1 2008 to March 31 2009 the Landlord and Tenant Board received 85,840 applications under the Residential Tenancy Act. Of these 92% were filed by landlords while only 8% were filed by tenants. Of the applications filed by landlords 59,053 were L1’s to evict the tenant and terminate the tenancy for nonpayment. These applications cost landlords $170.00 each. Ontario landlords spent over $10,000,000.00 just in application fees to evict nonpaying tenants.