What should international students pay attention to when renting a house?

After graduating from college, my first job and my classmates rented a house near the unit and got along well with the landlord, but later some practices of the landlord were really wonderful.

1. Rent penalty is too high.

If you take the formal rental process, you usually sign a one-year rental contract. According to the lease agreement in British Columbia, if the tenant chooses to terminate the lease in advance, he will generally pay 1 month rent as liquidated damages.

2. Facilitate the signing of the contract

Many new immigrants or international students will face the situation that they are not sure how long they will live here, or even how long they will live in this city. However, some landlords will inform tenants when renting a house: the shortest contract can only be 1 year, not shorter.

In this way, strangers will think that the law here stipulates that renting a house starts from 1 year, so they have to sign a contract. When I moved a few months later due to irresistible factors, I could only admit that I was unlucky and paid a penalty.

3. The advertisement for renting a house is exaggerated.

When new immigrants or international students first arrive in Canada, they often don't know how to distinguish the room types here. Like what is a semi-basement? What is the house in the back alley? So they are easily deceived by online advertisements.

For example, some advertisements say: the first floor of the rental villa, one room and one living room, independent access. When the tenant decided to rent out and see the house, he found that the so-called first floor was actually the basement, and the so-called independent passage was actually the back door of the basement.

However, landlords often talk about renting through informal channels, and even some landlords need three months' rent as a deposit. What's even more sinister is that when they explained why the money was seized, they only told some of them, and other tenants didn't know. After renting a house, I was inexplicably deducted a lot of deposits.

At this time, the landlord solemnly moved out of the laws and regulations and told the tenant why he wanted to detain the money. These are all very legal acts. Tenants can only eat dumb losses at this time.

In short, try to rent a house through formal channels and pay half a month's rent as a deposit. If renting a house privately, the landlord had better write down the deposit receipt and deposit deduction conditions in writing to avoid complications.