This Brampton landlord 'can't sleep at night' after he says his tenant stopped paying rent and won't leave

A renter who told a past times landlord she made $120,000 a twelvemonth as an online contents creator is scheduled to go before Ontario's Landlord and renter Board next month, accused of not paying rent to her current landlord for almost a year.

Ramanjeet Singh is the second landlord since 2023 to seek an eviction order against the woman. He says she paid her first and last month's rent deposit and moved into his Brampton townhouse in April 2025. But since then, he says, she's made no further payments and refuses to leave.

Singh says the tenant owes him just over $23,000 for unpaid rent and utilities, meaning he's had had to cover those bills, plus the mortgage on the townhouse, as well as his own family expenses.

In Ontario, landlords cannot evict a tenant — only the Landlord and Tenant Board can do that. Singh applied to the LTB for an eviction order in September. The LTB could order the woman to pay him his back rent and could also evict her.

A hearing is now scheduled to take place April 9. But in the meantime, Singh continues to rack up financially crippling payments on the rental property, which he said was an experiment he wishes he'd never taken on.

"I'm planning to sell," he said. "It's been a horrible experience for me, I don' think I'm going to rent to anyone in the future."

It's not the first time the woman has faced an eviction order. 

In April 2023, Tim Rye rented his furnished, two-bedroom condo in downtown Toronto to the woman, for about $4,500 a month. 

He says he hired a real estate agency to vet her, but in retrospect wishes he'd checked into her employment and rental history himself.

Although she paid him a three-month deposit, after the first month, no rent cheques arrived, according to LTB documents.

When Rye approached her for an explanation, he says he was told she'd lost her job.

She also claimed her legal representative was sick and could not attend that day — a statement that was proven to be untrue, according to the LTB ruling. An eviction order was issued for May 26, by which point the woman had moved, Rye said.

The LTB agreed Rye was owed $59,000 in back rent and ordered the woman to pay $35,000— the maximum order the tribunal was allowed to grant.

But Rye says he doesn't believe he'll ever see any of that money, not to mention the $30,000 he says the woman cost him in damage to the unit and stolen furniture.

Landlords who are owed money by a tenant can ask the LTB to help collect it by filling out an L10 form, also called the Application to Collect Money the Former Tenant Owes, according to the Tribunals Ontario website.

"We're not expecting to recover any money," Rye said. "At this point, it's really about holding her accountable."

Both Singh and Rye say they wish they'd been more scrupulous in looking into the woman's background before renting to her.

Ajay Grewal, a lawyer who specializes in representing landlords and is a former LTB adjudicator, points new landlords toward professional screening agencies that can look into a prospective tenant's background, before a lease is signed.

Also helpful, he suggests, are resources like the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) which offers a free, searchable database of past and current court cases, or Openroom, a resource that keeps track of LTB rulings made against both tenants and landlords.

Although the LTB does not keep track of tenants who are evicted or owe money as a result of past tribunal rulings, Grewal warns bad tenants could be a growing phenomenon.

"A lot of landlords, in my experience, have chosen to get out of rentals completely and instead put their money into more guaranteed investments," he said. 

As the rental housing supply dwindles, renters can become desperate and resort to unorthodox ways of saving money, he said.

"You do have some bad actors ... Who probably could afford to pay the rent but choose not to because they know it'll take a few months to get them out."

According to Tribunals Ontario, as of September 2025, the LTB has reduced its active case backlog to 36,689 applications, down from a peak of over 53,000 in early 2024.

Despite the reduction, average wait times for hearings remain between three to seven months, with some urgent matters taking less time.

michael.smee@cbc.ca

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