Vanessa Sih plays with her two young daughters on a bed in a Calgary hotel.
The hotel has been home for her family of four since she moved out of her rental property at the end of February, after which the owner needed the unit back.
Since then, Sih, her husband, her 12-year-old daughter and two-year-old daughter have lived in three other hotels while they looked for a place to rent.
There are obvious signs of the family settling in: their clothes are piled high in an open piece of luggage on the floor and there’s a table strewn with fruits and other snacks.
The search to find a rental property has been difficult, Sih said, and invasive; she said that some landlords were asking for personal information like her social insurance number (SIN), not to rent the property but simply to view it.
“Our full name, my daughters’ full names. They also asked for their birthdays. My SIN … driver’s license. They asked for [our] vehicle’s plate number,” Sih said.
Sih said she did not feel completely comfortable giving that information out, adding she didn’t feel “safe” with those details in someone else’s hands, but admitted that she shared them in hopes the family would be able to find a place to live.
Despite her efforts, and her information, Sih has not been able to find a new place to live yet.
“Right now, I feel very desperate to find a place for my family,” she said.
Tight rental market
In Alberta, vacancy rates stood at 4.3 per cent in October 2022, their lowest since 2013, according to numbers from the Canadian Mortgage Housing Corporation.
In times of high vacancy rates, some landlords have given tenants free rent or even a free television; but when there are low vacancy rates, the ball is in the court of landlords.
Megan Plumtree and her partner have been looking for a place to rent in Calgary since January, but she has also run into situations where very sensitive information was being requested to view a property.
“We’re being asked for a social insurance number. We’re being asked for photocopies of our driver’s license, our banking information, like account details,” she said.
Both Sih and Plumtree said they were told by the landlords that the information was needed to verify their identity and to weed out potential bad tenants.
Plumtree calls the practice “an overreach” and says that when she has declined to provide information to a landlord, she does not hear back from them.
“It’s definitely made the search a lot harder and it’s taken a lot longer than we’ve expected,” she said.
“It’s extremely stressful. We’ve both had dreams, like nightmares, about not being able to find rentals. It’s hard being ignored. It’s hard being asked for so much personal information without being able to meet someone, to talk to them to see if we even want to rent the space.”
‘They could take on your identity’
Drew McArthur, the former acting information and privacy commissioner for British Columbia, said privacy laws require individuals to be told what the purpose is of collecting their personal information and said that those purposes must be reasonable.
“To be asking for sensitive personal information such as financial, banking information, passport, that’s among the most sensitive personal information — that doesn’t seem to make sense in the circumstances of just wanting to view a rental property,” he said.
“It seems to me that organizations might be trying to take advantage of the situation, might be trying to pressure people into providing information and renting under a bit of duress.”
McArthur said that there are concerns about what someone could do with sensitive information.
“They could take on your identity. They could use it for nefarious purposes. They could try opening credit cards in your name… The possibilities are almost endless and we always need to protect our personal information,” he said.
McArthur said renters could say no if asked to provide sensitive personal information or they could file a complaint with provincial, territorial or federal privacy commissioners, though he admits that the complaint process does take some time, typically longer than most tenants may have.
Landlords may be safeguarding properties, the landlord group says
Alberta Community Landlords is an online community and educational resource for more than 4,000 landlords.
Co-founder MacKenzie Wilson said pre-screening is important for landlords to ensure both landlords and tenants are a good fit for one another.
“If you’ve had the wrong person [who] doesn’t pay rent, you’re going to be in trouble quite quickly and it can be quite daunting,” he said.
He said it can be common during pre-screening to ask about moving dates, the type of property a tenant is interested in and the type of lease they want.
But he is clear that it is inappropriate to ask for sensitive information, such as driver’s license information or banking information.
“It’s very concerning on a number of points,” he said. “We need to be good stewards to maintain the industry… It’s a mutually beneficial relationship. Landlords need tenants as much as tenants need landlords.”
WATCH | Would-be renters asked to hand over sensitive information to landlords:
Wilson said one possible explanation is that landlords are requesting personal information to safeguard their properties.
“I can imagine perhaps some folks or individuals are quite nervous. They’re overprotecting themselves by asking too much information too early in the process … It’s just simply not knowing what they don’t know.”
As for Sih, she and her family will continue to live in hotels, which are running her a bill of approximately $1,000 a week, until they can find a place to call home.
“It’s very frustrating, very frustrating and sad to live in a hotel,” she said.
