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Professional Tenants owing $100K
January 2025 Edition of the Openroom Rental Nexus Newsletter
Weiting Bollu
January 12, 2025
Good morning / 早上好 / Bonjour / ਸ਼ੁਭ ਸਵੇਰ / Buen día friend
Welcome to the January 2025 Edition of this newsletter where I take you behind-the-scenes as we build Openroom.ca with you.
At Openroom, we aggregate tenancy court orders across Canada, extract information from them, and put it to public use (e.g. search engine, impact credit history).
Take Action 1 👉 : Know of a stellar property manager across Canada? Innovative, forward thinking, and "knows their stuff". It can even be you! Reply back and let me know.
Why? In the February newsletter and on Openroom.ca, we're going to feature each of the ones sent in by you. Let's start off the year by giving them kudos and showcase them to 40K community members next month.
Take Action 2 👉: Start the year off learning about cybersecurity for housing providers on Tuesday, January 12, 2025 at 7PM EST on Zoom in partnership with Durham Landlords Association. Everyone across Canada is welcome to join. See the event
👩🏻 Top update from me, Weiting (Co-Founder)
Professional Tenants owing nearly $100K to 4 different landlords in Ontario?!
CBC Journalist Robyn Miller spent the last half of the year piecing together this story.
I had a chance to meet her last year to talk about this very topic. The video launched 3 days ago, and it has nearly 300K views on Youtube.
Professional Tenants: someone who knows how to game the system and they know what to do to delay situations.
Openroom had orders from all 3 housing providers who took these tenants to the Tribunal. The 4th settled on a Cash for Keys so there was no Tribunal Order.
This is not okay.
Your involvement in the movement to hold people accountable for their actions is more important than ever. We must get to the future of transparent and connected rental ecosystem - faster.
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The comments on the video was on fire 🔥.
🧠 Caring for your mental health
Canada, 12 days in and it's already been quite the start to a 2025 new year. How are you doing? On a scale of 0 (terrible) - 10 (excellent), how are you doing - really?
The biggest news so far is that our Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, is stepping down after nearly a decade of public service. Mr. Trudeau spoke about his internal battles during his resignation speech. |  |
Imagine being the one that millions of people blame when some things are out of your control. The game of politics is not for the faint of heart. I cannot imagine the bureaucracy, personal agendas, and red tape that is involved.
I mean, there's a whole government department called "Ministry of Red Tape Reduction"! I had to ask for clarification when I first heard of it.
Normal citizens like me don't fully grasp it, but that's what I've been trying to learn so I can re-share it back with you all.
For me, I've personally taken more calls than I can count on my finger about the mental health struggles that members of the Openroom community are going through due to rental disputes.
I feel you and I hear you.
A good friend and mentor, Cherry Rose Tan wrote a book called STILL STANDING. It's a book on entrepreneurs neglecting their mental health when they shouldn't. Each housing provider owns a business and therefore, an entrepreneur. |  |
In it, she writes about forgiveness.
"Forgiveness is letting go of resentment and revenge so that we can create understanding and compassion for who or what hurt us."
In cases of unpaid rent dispute, some people looking from the outside think: “landlords are rich” or “it's the cost of doing business”.
Normal citizens like you and I put our savings into investment vehicles that are available to us. Some choose venture capital, some choose stock market, and some choose real estate.
We do this to try to beat inflation, and/or to create a nest egg for our kids or for our retirement some years down the line. Because we can't depend on a pension to live the life on our own terms.
I personally felt the emotional, physical, and mental distress that came with a $35,000+ rental dispute that the financial side became a side concern. I told myself that I'm a smart cookie, I can go find ways to make more money.
But, if my mental health is not top tier, then forget about everything else.
Forget starting a family (which I was pregnant at the time), forget being a kick-butt A-Player at work, and forget being a partner/sister/daughter. Mental health was table stakes.
Instead, I turned to my Co-Founder, Vishal Bollu, and we built a movement towards transparency with each of you. Starting from 2 sets of eyeballs on openroom.ca to over half a million since we started in July 2022.
For housing providers who were in the situation of unpaid rent - why let those who didn't pay rent continue to live rent free in your head?
This is my call to you: Give yourself permission to forgive (not necessarily forget) and put that energy to where it can count the most.
If you're not sure how, we're always looking for help from our community so ping me!
📊 Community Polling
Openroom conducts research in every newsletter. Results are anonymous.
Have you or someone you know ever experienced a mental health condition?Did you know that 1 in 5 Canadians experience mental illness? |
That’s it for today. I’d love to hear from you - always. You can reach me directly by emailing back to this!
Weiting Bollu
Mom, Rental Housing Provider, Rental Housing Advocate, Educator, and Openroom Co-Founder & CEO
p.s. The best gift you can give us is to share this newsletter with a friend. Forward it!
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