I'm not a lawyer but I spent several years working a related field. I'm very familiar with the residential tenancy act and was involved dozens of tenancy disputes and evictions.
With all due respect, the advice about leases providing more rights to homeowners is plain wrong. When it comes to evicting someone from a residence, the rules are rooted in common law, not the RTA. If someone has given you money in exchange for staying in your residential property, and if that person doesn't want to leave, it's the same long and costly process to get them out whether they're a tenant, a lessee, a roommate or otherwise. And the courts look very unfavourably on owners who try to skirt those rules.
Sure, a lease says you're entitled to the remainder of the lease if the lessee breaks the contract, but if you think you're going to sue that out of a deadbeat you're mistaken, and you're going to waste a lot of time and money finding that out.
You have to look at being a landlord as a job. It takes a tremendous amount of diligence and ongoing work, and even then odds are you'll get a bad tenant sooner or later. When that happens, if you've played by the rules of the RTA and have the documentation to prove it, you can get a bad tenant out within 60 days, but it may cost you some time and money to do so. Sure, that sucks... but a good landlord comes across that once or twice in a career and it's a cost of doing business. There are shitty people in the world and we all get fucked over by one of them sooner or later.
Of the dozens of tenancy disputes and evictions I was involved with, exactly two were good, diligent landlords. The rest were bad landlords, and many of them got hit again and again.
A good landlord checks and re-checks refs - previous landlords, work, and personal references. Then they do diligence to make sure those references are real. They make sure they have good relationships with their tenants. They visit the residence regularly, keep up on maintenance, and respond quickly to problems reported by tenants. A good landlord maintains the home in the same condition she would if she were living there. A good landlord looks at their tenant as a business partner, and they know that good relationships are important in business. They know a good tenant when they find one, and do whatever they can to keep them.
Bad landlords do none of those things. They do shoddy reference checks, they don't visit the residence, they let maintenance slide, they don't respond promptly to tenant problems or complaints, they don't keep good records, they do shoddy repair work instead of hiring a professional. They think their job is done when they find a tenant and the rest is just collecting checks. They're like any bad business person, not willing to put in the work to be successful, and then when something inevitably goes south they act the victim. All the bad landlords had this in common; they saw tenants as enemies and they felt victimized by them, victimized by the RTA, victimized by the courts, the sheriffs, etc. etc. And like everyone with a victim mentality, they are somehow never able to accept responsibility for their own actions, or inaction.
OP, I'm not saying that's you... my point is just that being a landlord is hard work, and you have to treat it as such. If you can't see it as a job and craft, get out of the game, or hire a property management company. Just be careful if you do - there are good and bad property management companies. The good ones are worth every penny, the bad ones will bleed both you and the tenant and provide no service in return, and when they inevitably put a bad tenant in your suite, you'll be left holding the bag.
