My Old Apartment: PEI tenants mail the old rent to the new tenant (interview)

In an NPR interview, Darcie Lanthier says that in Prince Edward Island, Canada, rent on an apartment can only rise by a set percentage each year, but a tenant who has just moved in cannot tell whether the rent is lawful without knowing what the previous tenant paid. She says she first thought of encouraging people to write to their old address, then realised they needed to supply more information.

So she developed a card about the size of a Christmas card. The front asks 'Are you paying too much rent?'; inside is a space for the date the former tenant moved out and the rent they were paying, plus 'very direct information on exactly how to fix the problem', including how to file a form to get the rent cut back to the legal limit. The former tenant fills in two things and posts or delivers it to the old address. If they moved out at $1,200 and the current tenant pays $1,500, the overcharge is visible at once.

The first card was delivered by a friend of hers, and it hit exactly that case: the current tenant, Lanthier said, would probably get about $5,400 back in overpaid rent and see the rent returned to the legal limit. She added that landlords who follow the rules were glad to see it, since they did not like their reputation tarnished by those who do not, and that landlords who renovate can apply for a non-standard increase.

The Twitter account @apartmentold, opened four days before the interview, had just over 10,000 followers (she had about 2,600 on her personal account after ten years). People from across the US wrote to her, and a group in Montreal planned to try the same.

The former tenant is the only person who knows the last legal rent, and has no reason to withhold it once asked.

A pre-printed card with two blanks takes a minute to fill in, so the cost to the sender is almost nothing.

Printed instructions on how to file the form turn a discovery into an actual rent reduction and refund.

Landlords who play by the rules have no reason to oppose it, which blunts the pushback.

When a rule is unenforceable because information is held by the wrong person, build the cheapest possible channel that moves it to the person with the standing to act.

By the time of the NPR interview, the card had been hand-delivered by volunteers and the project's Twitter account had passed 10,000 followers in four days. Lanthier says a group in Montreal planned to organize something similar on the ground. The interview does not report how many Prince Edward Island tenants ultimately filed or recovered money.