Key Takeaways
- Calgary’s rental market is shifting from a landlord’s market toward more balance, meaning rent reductions and incentives need more thought, not just imitation of big property management companies.
- Aggressive rental incentives (waived deposits, free rent) can undercut small landlords and set the tone for a tenant relationship built on renegotiation.
- A short-term fixed lease, rather than a month-to-month, gives landlords more protection when a tenant is a borderline fit.
- Understanding “landlord archetypes” (accidental, dabbler, investor, strategic) helps landlords decide when to hire support versus manage properties themselves.
- Clear, empathetic communication, not judgment, is the throughline for handling difficult tenant situations, including domestic violence lease breaks and non-payment.
- Screening should go beyond credit checks: verifying landlord references, checking title, and requesting supporting documentation from pet owners all reduce risk.
- Calgary’s secondary suite legalization amnesty and incentive programs can meaningfully offset the cost of legalizing suites built before March 2018.
- There is a real difference between full property management and property support services, and knowing which one you need depends on how hands-on you want to stay.
Introduction
Every real estate investor eventually becomes a landlord, whether that happens on purpose or by accident. At a recent Calgary Real Estate Investor Hub meetup, we hosted landlord and property support specialist Laura Atherton, who currently manages roughly 88 rental units built through everything from bootstrapped joint ventures to multifamily partnerships. She shared what she has learned about reading the Calgary rental market, avoiding the mistakes that create bad landlord reputations, and knowing when to bring in help. This article summarizes the key lessons from that conversation, from screening and communication through to the mechanics of legalizing a basement suite.
Reading the Current Calgary Rental Market
Atherton opened the session by polling the room on what kind of market Calgary landlords are currently operating in. The consensus was that the city is moving out of a strict landlord’s market and into something closer to balanced, with occupancy still relatively high but rents beginning to soften. She pointed out that a landlord’s market is not always easier to manage. When inquiries number in the hundreds, filtering for the right tenant becomes its own challenge, not unlike sorting through hundreds of resumes to find one good hire.
That shift in market conditions is prompting more landlords to consider rental incentives, and Atherton urged caution here. Large property management companies can absorb the cost of dropping security deposits to a few hundred dollars or offering a free month of rent, but small landlords competing on the same terms put themselves at a disadvantage.
“For us small landlords out there, we can’t compete with some of those rental incentives.” Laura Atherton
Her larger concern with rent reductions specifically is what they signal to a new tenant about whether rent is negotiable going forward. Instead, Atherton favours value-adds and small gifts tailored to what a tenant actually wants, which she says builds goodwill without setting a precedent of negotiable rent.
Landlord Dos and Don’ts
Much of the session covered fundamentals that Atherton described as commonly overlooked rather than unknown. Landlords should stay current on the Residential Tenancies Act (RTA), the Alberta legislation that governs the rights and obligations of landlords and tenants, including notice periods, security deposits, and lawful grounds for entry or eviction. She recommended Calgary Residential Rental Association (CRRA) as a resource landlords should be members of, both for staying current on legislation and for accessing a vetted base lease agreement.
On the “don’t” side, she flagged a handful of habits that damage landlord reputations broadly: advertising listings with misleading photos or descriptions, ignoring maintenance requests, entering a unit without proper notice, and keeping security deposits without justification.
What is an offense under Alberta’s rental laws?
Her broader philosophy is to treat the landlord-tenant relationship as a human one first. That means no discrimination, no pressuring tenants to move out, and no using renovictions as a workaround, and it means holding maintenance requests to a reasonable but consistent standard, even when a tenant’s expectations run ahead of what the lease actually covers.
Landlord and Tenant Archetypes
Atherton walked through a framework of landlord types, with the caveat that no version is inherently better than another and that most landlords move between categories over time.
- Accidental landlord: someone who becomes a landlord because they can’t sell, not because they set out to invest.
- Dabbler: a landlord managing properties off the side of their desk, often without dedicated time or systems.
- Investor: someone building a portfolio with more intention, though still balancing it against other work.
- Strategic investor: a landlord operating with defined systems and long-term goals, though Atherton noted that even experienced investors can slide back toward “newbie” when they move into an unfamiliar strategy, like their first ground-up development.
On the tenant side, she described a similar spread, from “delightful” tenants who maintain the property and pay early, to “needy” tenants who message constantly about issues outside the lease, to “aggressive” tenants who escalate conflict. Her point was not to sort tenants for judgment, but to help landlords recognize patterns early and adjust communication accordingly, since most tenant behaviour, difficult or not, tends to trace back to something happening in that person’s life.
Communication Strategies for Difficult Situations
Atherton shared two detailed examples from her own portfolio to illustrate how she approaches high-stress tenant situations.
The first involved a tenant breaking a lease due to domestic violence. Under the RTA, a tenant in that situation is permitted to break a lease for safety reasons, but Atherton pointed out that this alone does not solve the tenant’s housing problem. Her role became less about enforcing the lease and more about coordinating: changing locks, communicating with both parties fairly without assigning blame, and working out a modified timeline or payment plan so the tenant could transition safely.
The second example, raised by an attendee, involved discovering fentanyl in a tenant’s belongings and having police remove the tenant from the property. Atherton’s response focused on a pattern she has seen repeatedly in her own worst outcomes: she noted that most of her most difficult tenant situations started with her “doing someone a favor,” such as skipping a full screening process out of empathy for someone’s circumstances. Her takeaway was not to stop extending flexibility to tenants, but to be more deliberate about when and how that flexibility is offered.
Screening, Leases, and Documentation
Atherton’s screening process is largely manual by design. She runs credit checks, calls employers, and calls listed landlords directly, and she has occasionally pulled property title to confirm that a “landlord” reference is actually who they claim to be. She uses a base lease from the Calgary Residential Rental Association rather than templates bundled with listing websites, supplemented with her own addenda, including a detailed pet addendum for responsible pet owners.
On lease structure, she recommends a fixed-term lease over a periodic (month-to-month) lease when there is any uncertainty about a prospective tenant, since a fixed term locks in a defined period rather than allowing the tenancy to continue indefinitely with only notice required to end it. For borderline applicants, she may offer a shorter six-month fixed term rather than a full year, both to limit exposure and to avoid a lease ending in the middle of winter, when vacancy is harder to fill.
She also cautioned landlords against treating a lease as final before keys are handed over. If red flags appear during the leasing process itself, such as a prospective tenant pushing back on standard lease terms, that behaviour is worth weighing before finalizing anything.
Property Support Services vs. Full Property Management
A recurring theme was the distinction between hiring a full property manager and using a property support service, which is the model Atherton and her husband built after outgrowing self-management themselves. Property support services, as she described her own offering, sit in the middle: helping with tasks like lead generation, tenant screening, move-in and move-out inspections, and maintenance coordination, without taking on the fiduciary responsibility of handling rent or trust funds. That distinction matters because it means landlords who are not ready to hand over full control can still get support with the most time-consuming parts of managing a rental.
Atherton suggested landlords ask themselves a simple question when weighing this decision: at what point does the workload stop being manageable, whether that’s a specific number of doors or simply the point where you stop being able to keep track of your tenants and their circumstances.
Legalizing Basement Suites in Calgary
Atherton, who has legalized secondary suites across her own portfolio, walked through the two City of Calgary programs currently available to landlords with older basement suites.
Under Calgary’s secondary suite amnesty program, suites that existed before March 12, 2018 can be legalized without installing a separate secondary heat source, a requirement that would otherwise be costly in a fully drywalled basement (source). Separately, the City’s Secondary Suite Incentive Program provides qualifying homeowners up to $10,000 toward construction and registration costs, with additional bonuses of up to $1,250 for energy-efficient egress windows and heating equipment and up to $5,000 for accessibility improvements.
Atherton estimated that legalization costs generally run between $5,000 and $20,000 depending on scope, with a full basement ceiling drywall replacement sitting at the higher end. Her advice was straightforward: minimum safety requirements, such as guardrails or a required sump pump connection, are non-negotiable with city inspectors even when they aren’t explicitly listed, so it’s worth budgeting some flexibility into any legalization project.
Maintenance Response and Key Systems
On maintenance, Atherton’s team targets a 24 to 72 hour response window, prioritizing active leaks and non-functioning appliances while batching minor issues, like a loose towel hook, into scheduled inspection visits that happen a minimum of three times a year. She was direct about middle-of-the-night calls: her standard advice to tenants is to shut off the water and wait until morning rather than call an emergency plumber who is unlikely to arrive quickly or do quality work at 2 a.m.
On lock systems, she described using smart locks paired with on-site lock boxes as a middle ground between full master-key systems, which require a locksmith for any rekeying, and simple twist-key systems that become unmanageable across a larger portfolio.
FAQ
- What does Atherton’s team charge for services like showings and move-in or move-out inspections? Pricing depends on the specific service and property, but as an example, she cited move-in and move-out inspections at approximately $150 per visit at the time of the talk.
- Does she use third-party lease templates from listing websites? No. She uses a base lease agreement from the Calgary Residential Rental Association, supplemented with her own addenda for pets and property-specific terms, because she considers listing-site lease templates to be weaker documents.
- Is there a Canadian database to check whether a prospective tenant has a history of unpaid rent? No national database exists in Canada for this, partly due to privacy and anti-discrimination considerations. Landlords generally rely on their own records, informal networks, and reference checks instead.
- What is the average pet fee she charges? Around $50 per month, adjusted up or down depending on the tenant and market conditions. She treats it as a flexible tool rather than a fixed rule, and noted that a security deposit itself cannot legally exceed one month’s rent, so pet charges are structured as a separate monthly fee rather than an additional deposit.
- Does her company offer eviction or non-payment support services? She can support landlords through this process, but is intentionally cautious about being positioned solely as an eviction service, and prefers to focus on communication strategies that resolve issues before they reach the Residential Tenancy Dispute Resolution Service (RTDRS) or court.
