$30,000 fine, 1 year suspension for property managers: BCFSA

A property manager in British Columbia was reprimanded by the province’s real estate regulator for failing to collect a tenant’s security deposit, writing the wrong address on the lease and failing to adequately enforce the owners’ wishes to ban pets and smoking.

The BC Financial Services Authority posted its settlement agreement with Donald Paul Nichol, proposed and accepted last month, on its website this week.

In the document, Nichol admits to several counts of misconduct related to a property he managed for his employer, Pacific Quorum Properties Inc. in Surrey, BC. He also agrees to a one-year suspension of his license, a $30,000 disciplinary fine and $2,000 in enforcement costs.

The penalties arise from Nichols’ tenure as manager of the Surrey rental property in 2016 and 2017, during which the property was subject to two separate leases.

When the owners hired Pacific Quorum to manage the rental, they stated that they wanted to include a no smoking and no pets policy in all signed rental agreements.

Nichol had not included such clauses in the initial lease, and an addendum adding the ban on pets was never signed by the tenant, according to the consent order. The addendum did not include a no-smoking clause.

When the first tenant notified her that she was terminating her fixed-term lease early, Nichol made no effort to contact the tenant to collect the agreed-upon $2,000 early termination penalty. The tenant lost her $1,000 security deposit, but the landlords were $1,000 short, according to the consent agreement.

The second lease presented further problems. The order states that Nichol had failed to include a no-pets rule in an addendum to the lease. He also failed to collect the tenants’ security deposits or conduct a move-in inspection before the tenants moved into the home.

The lease also listed the wrong address of the property, an error that was discovered by the Residential Tenancy Branch when the property owners asked Nichol to evict the second tenants.

Findings of misconduct

In the consent order, Nichol admitted several counts of misconduct in relation to the property, all of which fell into one or more of the three categories of the Real Estate Services Act.

He did not act in the best interests of his clients by failing to collect security deposits from the secondary tenants, failing to conduct a move-in inspection, and failing to perform credit checks on the tenants as instructed by the owners.

He failed to act in accordance with legal requirements when he did not include the pet and smoking ban clauses requested by customers in the rental agreements and when he failed to conduct a credit check.

And he failed to act with due care and skill in all of the foregoing misconduct, as well as two others: he failed to provide the correct address of the property in the contract, and he failed to make reasonable efforts to collect the fine from the first tenant.

Pacific Quorum told the BCFSA that Nichol “has a large portfolio of property management clients” and that the company would need time “to make appropriate arrangements for the transfer of records.”

Against this backdrop, the regulator ordered Nichols’ suspension to begin on June 21, about a month after it accepted his request for a temporary restraining order.