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Holding Landlords Accountable Too
Tenants reporting debt owed by landlords to Equifax
Weiting Bollu
December 04, 2025
Good morning / 早上好 / Bonjour / ਸ਼ੁਭ ਸਵੇਰ / Buen día friend!
In this final Openroom Co-Founder Newsletter of the 2025 year: Tenants reporting landlords to the credit bureau, and happy (almost) holidays to you.
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When a court or tribunal confirms that a landlord owes a tenant money, Openroom now provides a way for that unpaid debt to be reported to Equifax, where it may negatively impact the landlord’s credit score and credit history.
The one misconception about Openroom is that we only support the landlords.
Openroom advocates for the responsible housing providers (i.e. landlords) and the responsible residents (i.e. tenants) in the Canadian rental ecosystem. The bad actors need to be held accountable whether a landlord or tenant because they hurt the good actors in our community.
In May 2023, Co-Founder Vishal and I penned a letter to the Openroom community:
Recap:
Dear Openroom Community,
As Founders of openroom.ca, we want to take a moment to express our heartfelt appreciation for your passionate support and involvement.
In September 2022, we created a small passion project that was motivated from our own tenancy dispute. Over the course of the last year, the community has responded to our project with curiosity and engagement. This is not to be taken for granted because many projects don’t end up getting the attention they deserve. Thank you for your continued involvement and active participation.
As we maintained the website and got feedback from you, we have begun to understand the depth of the rental ecosystem. Our interactions with you, the community, has taught us about the current state of affairs and pain points from many different perspectives. While there is a lot more to still learn, your feedback helped us understand the key points that Openroom is now rallying around.
Our vision is that one day, there will be a transparent and connected rental ecosystem that appropriately incentivizes responsible members.
Our operating principles will always remain true as we continue our work to achieve this vision.
1. Landlords are business owners. Being a landlord is not hands-free passive income. Landlords are providing a service of housing in exchange for money. The tenants are customers. Landlords should make every attempt to provide the best service: a well maintained rental unit that is safe and legal to inhabit. Landlords should be aware of and comply with rental policies and regulations of their place of business.
2. Tenants are responsible customers. Tenants are aware of the policies and regulations and should be empowered to advocate for their rights. Tenants are responsible customers who will pay for services rendered in a timely fashion, maintain the rental unit in good condition, and respect what is stipulated within the signed rental agreement.
With the two key points above, we want to create an ecosystem that incentivizes the millions of Landlords and Tenants to engage in the business of tenancy as responsible members of the rental ecosystem.
There is a lot of opportunity to save time, money, and mental calories. We can make massive improvements together.
We’re now at the end of 2025, and the statements in this letter has not changed.
🙋🏻♀️ What does that mean?
While the majority of cases in front of Adjudicators throughout Canada are from Landlords, there are still a subset from tenants whereby the landlord owes compensation to the tenant.
We worked with legal teams and tenants over the last few months to build in a capability where tenants can report their landlords for bad debt to Equifax, and it will remain on the credit history for the next 6 years.
New: Openroom’s Rental Debt Ledger for Tenants Filing Against Landlord
🤔 Where does the debt come from?
There are many types of cases that appear in front of Tribunals or Courts where a landlord may owe a tenant compensation. These include but are not limited to:
Landlord gets caught in a bad faith eviction situations (e.g. Ontario).
Landlord does not return the key, pet, and/or security deposit when they should (e.g. British Columbia).
Landlord had collected illegal rent increases (e.g. Ontario).
👉 What else do I need to know?
Tenants (Creditor) who files a rental debt ledger against their landlords (Debtor) through Openroom will not have their name be searchable within the Public Record Search Engine used for Tenant Screening purposes.
All cases can be found within Openroom’s Legal Research service by searching for various attributes that is not a tenant’s name.
Openroom does this for select cases we have in our database to enable a tenant to enact their rights and not be harmed from doing so.
Learn more on how to file one, and help us share with a friend who may benefit.
A last thank you this 2025 year
Co-Founder Vishal and I want you to know that we appreciate you for being part of the build of Openroom with us.
Building towards a future of a transparent and connected rental ecosystem is not easy but please give yourself a pat on the back too because together, we’ve come a long way.
These are my top 3 memories of 2025:
Openroom SuperFans who came out to meet us (and one another) in our first in-person dinners this summer.
Openroom getting certified as a Consumer Reporting Agency in Ontario by the government.
Me (Weiting) getting my first pay check from Openroom. Minimum wage never felt so good!
Thank you for buying us 652 cups of coffee to keep us caffeinated (fyi, they actually go towards coffee)!
Please continue to share Openroom with your friends, colleagues, family, media, government, and others so we can make more informed decisions on who we rent to and who we rent from.
Have questions, suggestions, comments, opinions? Reply back to this email and I’ll try my best to respond. If I don’t, ping me again - seriously.
Happy holidays, and I’ll see you back in the new year!
Weiting Bollu
Mom, Rental Housing Provider, Rental Housing Advocate, Educator, and Openroom Co-Founder & CEO
What does my team at Openroom do?
At Openroom, we aggregate tenancy court orders across Canada, extract information from them, and put it to public use (e.g. public record search for tenant screening, rental debt reporting to Equifax, legal research for all, reduce delinquency risk while renters get to build credit).
We also educate about rental housing, provide free resources, and we advocate for a more transparent and connected rental ecosystem to support both responsible housing providers and residents.
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