An investigation by Ricochet has found that more than 1,500 entire homes and apartments across Quebec, registered with the government as primary residences, are likely being rented out as commercial operations on Airbnb by real-estate agents, hotel businesses, convicted criminals, and some of the province’s wealthiest citizens as of late this summer. 

Last September, Quebec revamped its short-term rental laws, adding fines as high as $100,000 for each non-conforming listing. At a press conference earlier this year, Caroline Proulx, Quebec’s minister of tourism, touted the law’s success, citing a significant increase in the compliance rate of online listings — from 58 to 90 per cent. 

The Minister was presumably referring to the number of listings displaying a provincial license number, now mandatory for short-term rentals. 

However, some feel that the province’s numbers might be grossly underestimated.

“This is bullshit,” said Cédric Dussault, spokesperson for the Regroupement des comités logement et associations de locataires du Québec (RCLALQ), in a phone interview. “The new law has no impact because there are a lot of ways you can bypass it.” 

As a result, the number of short-term rentals in Montreal and across the province has actually increased since the law came into effect.

The situation is especially dire in Montreal, a city facing one of its lowest vacancy rates in 20 years. As of earlier this summer, 616 households had requested the city’s help in 2024, and nearly 250 were in constant communication with the city’s housing office — 133 per cent more than last year. And yet, more than 500 apartments across the metropolis, meant to be housing locals, are being rented out to tourists for hundreds, even thousands of dollars per night. 

Despite provincial and municipal short-term rental regulations, those seeking to profit find loopholes or brazenly defy the law, while those in power are selectively and tepidly enforcing it. 

Using data obtained from Inside Airbnb and short-term rental license data obtained by access to information requests with the Corporation de l’industrie touristique du Québec (CITQ), Ricochet was able to analyze each short-term rental listed on Airbnb in Quebec. Filtering the data for entire homes or apartments that rely on a primary residence CITQ license number, available to rent short-term, and which were able to be rented for at least six months a year, Ricochet determined that many of the listings were not being lived in at all. 

Ricochet also requested the data relied upon by the provincial government directly from the ministry and from the company that produced it, Airdna. Both requests were denied. 

The results revealed networks of businesses using a variety of tactics to break or bypass the law. The following are the most blatant cases, which have been able to operate unimpeded since the law came into effect.

A con artist and a liar

One landlord, Michael Alexander Nickolas Roman Augustus, seems to think he has it made.

The founder of Posh Properties Inc. and MANRA Capital shared his expertise on “short-term rentals as an asset class” at the exclusive “High Net Worth Conference” in Montreal last fall. The target audience: Canada’s wealthiest individuals with a net worth of at least $400 million USD. 

Posh Properties claims on its website that it manages $35 million in assets and that it is bringing in $835,000 a month in revenue. 

“Founded in 2019, Posh Properties has a proven track record of investing in short-term real estate rentals across Quebec,” states Augustus’s conference biography. His website boasts 120 properties across Quebec and Ontario, with plans for global expansion. “This new alternative asset class is changing the parameters and returns of real estate investments.”

Sharing the stage with Augustus was an heiress of the Saputo dairy empire and a former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada alongside other notable C-suite executives and deep-pocketed investors. Bumping shoulders with Canada’s rich and connected couldn’t have come at a better time for Augustus, who is currently seeking millions in investment capital to help him expand Posh Properties across Canada, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates. 

But, there are some things the hosts of the conference, the former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, or potential investors might not have known; before 2020, Augustus’ legal name was Nickolas Michel Guindon-Vachon.

A co-founder of the Escapade Music Festival in Ottawa, Augustus, aka Guidon-Vachon, robbed his business partners and vanished in the early morning hours following the festival’s 2012 finale, with $600,000 stolen from the company safe. 

His car was found abandoned at Montreal’s Pierre-Elliott Trudeau Airport, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Police would discover he had chartered a private flight to Aruba, where he was hiding out in a luxury villa. He was ultimately convicted and ordered to pay $300,000 in restitution to his former partners.

“He hasn’t paid. He probably thinks he’s off the hook, I knew he had changed names, but it hasn’t been resolved,” said his former business partner, Michael O’Farrell. “He’s a con artist. He’s a liar. He will tell you what you want to hear.”

Now, under his new name, Augustus is once again breaking the law — and is being celebrated as a successful businessman for doing so. 

And he’s far from the only one.

Posh Properties: Poached licenses

Many of the apartments and homes Posh Properties lists on Airbnb use poached CITQ license numbers from other hosts, duplicate licenses across multiple listings, or entirely fabricated licenses — all in violation of Quebec’s Tourist Accommodation Act.

Ten apartments listed on the company’s Airbnb account, spread across Quebec City, are all using the same primary residence license number, which belongs to local restaurant owners Ronan Bonnette and Marielle Cyr. Neither Bonnette or Cyr answered multiple requests for comment prior to publication and it is unclear if they are active participants, or if they are even aware this is happening at all. 

Another home in the town of Mont-Tremblant is using a license number that belongs to an entirely different short-term rental company. When contacted by phone, the holder of the valid CITQ license used on Augustus’s ad said he has no connection to Posh Properties, and that the property being rented by Posh Properties is not theirs.

The company also provides several pamphlets aimed towards landlords, which attempts to convince them to ditch their traditional tenants in favor of a short-term rental business relationship. 

“How many times have you had to worry if your tenant was going to pay rent or not each month? What if we told you that worry would disappear with us,” the company boasts in its residential arbitrage portfolio. “Short-term rentals generate daily cash flow at 3-4x normal monthly rents. Sit back and relax, we’ll do all the heavy lifting and make sure you maximize your profits each month with the above market rent we provide.”

Ricochet has previously covered how landlords are teaming up with short-term rental arbiters at the expense of long-term tenants and housing availability more generally. 

Augustus did not respond to Ricochet’s requests for comment. 

“Financialization is the problem,” said Jayne Malenfant, McGill University professor specializing in housing insecurity and homelessness. “Even if fines are very large, if there’s an opportunity for people to make profit, people will still do it.”

Malenfant suggested that stronger regulations are required to stipulate how buildings can be used, or even how many buildings can be owned by one person or corporation. “Think of housing as a home and not an asset,” they said. 

Nomade MTL: An unlicensed hotel in a residential building

The fatal fire that tore through a historic building in Montreal’s Old City last year pushed municipal and provincial politicians to take action. The building was full to the brim with illegal Airbnbs, where most who lost their lives that day had been staying. A succession of measures regulating the short-term rentals was proposed to reign in what some experts have called a “wild west”.  

Just a few blocks from the burnt-out shell of the one-time ghost hotel on Rue du Port sits the London and Lancashire Life Building. As of this summer, the historic sandstone structure now houses short-term rentals operated by Nomade MTL, a company offering “boutique hotels” in Montreal and Phoenix, Arizona. Nomade MTL was able to secure CITQ licenses for commercial operations prior to the implementation of municipal by-laws which forbade any new licenses to be issued outside of specific tourist zones throughout the city. 

But staying competitive in the short-term rental market meant that Nomade MTL had few options for legal expansion while the market became flooded with others relying on primary residence permits to operate their commercial operations nearby. So Nomade MTL decided to follow suit. 

The company operates a residential apartment building on Drummond St. in downtown Montreal as a boutique hotel on a street not zoned for tourism accommodations. At least 12 of its 17 residential units were available to rent by the night on Airbnb when we checked; all of them relying on just two primary residence CITQ license numbers.

Nomade MTL’s founder and owner, Michael Elkeslassly, admitted that he made an arrangement with the building’s owner, 9387-2380 Quebec Inc., administered by Elias Khoury, a luxury real estate developer, to rent all 17 apartments. 

Elkeslassly then claimed he rented out two of those apartments to Jefrey Melendez Martinez and Nathalie Assouline, whose names appear as the license holders, and gave them permission to sublet their apartments short-term, as long as the ads were placed exclusively on Nomade MTL’s Airbnb account. 

“Only individuals can obtain a registration number for a principal residence establishment,” said a spokesperson for the Ministry of Tourism. “In other words, it is not possible for a legal entity, whether a numbered company or a hotel company, to submit an application for registration for a primary residence license. It is, however, possible for an operator of a primary residence establishment to entrust the distribution of its accommodation offer to a third party.”

Elkeslassy could not account for why multiple apartments located in the Drummond St. building rely on the same two license numbers.

Realtors breaking the rules

A host named “Art” had 19 apartments listed for rent on Airbnb across Montreal and Laval, as of earlier this summer. 

None of the CITQ licenses listed on Airbnb are connected to the advertised apartments; many are in entirely different regions. For instance, one listing in Montreal uses a CITQ license for a house in Gatineau, more than 200 kilometers away.

One apartment is located on Joliette St. in Montreal’s Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve borough, which has had an outright ban on commercial short-term rental operations within its territory since early last year. 

Each of “Art’s” apartments relies on a poached primary residence license, issued by the CITQ to other people, or phony numbers that have not been issued by the CITQ at all. An analysis of the CITQ numbers used by Art indicates that he chose a number at random, and, for each other apartment, attempted to use a consecutive number. 

According to his Airbnb profile, his account has been active for at least one year, and had 722 reviews at the time we reviewed it. 

“A lot of tenants are being pushed out of their apartments because landlords want to do Airbnbs,” said Annie Lapalme, a community organizer at Entraide Logement Hochelaga working on tenant evictions in the neighborhood. Despite the new bylaw, she says not much has changed. “no one [in political office] is doing anything about it.”

“When I call the borough to make a complaint, they say that they cannot do anything and refer us to Quebec,” said Lapalme. However, when she calls the provincial authorities as instructed by her borough mayor, she gets a similar answer. “Quebec is saying that it is a borough’s bylaw.”

Meanwhile, illegal short-term rentals continue to proliferate in the borough.

An analysis relying on open source intelligence techniques verified that most of the buildings listed by “Art” are owned by KapDon Inc., or directly by its administrators, Vartan Kaprielov and Irina Dondikova.

Kaprielov and Dondikova did not return requests for comment by the time of publication.

The place that Kaprielov and Dondikova list as their home address on several documents reviewed by Ricochet is a large riverfront, mid-century villa valued at over $1.5 million by Laval’s tax assessment role. 

Both Kaprielov and Dondikova are real estate agents, but Dondikova’s license was revoked earlier this year following a disciplinary hearing before the industry’s regulatory body in Quebec, the Organisme d’autoréglementation du courtage immobilier du Québec (OACIQ). 

The OACIQ said that any act that is illegal, or harmful to the public or profession opens up the agent to potential sanction and fines. “He must fulfill his duties and obligations in the same way, whether he is in the context of renting, buying, or selling a property,” said a spokesperson for the organization. 

Stanzia: Redefining principal residence 

Stanzia, a short-term rental company based in Montreal, appears to be a legitimate operation. Its website is polished and the company is in good standing according to Quebec’s business registry. 

“Specializing in short-term rentals through various platforms, we provide assistance to individuals lacking expertise in the realm of short-term accommodation. Our goal is to enable them to generate temporary income while away from their primary residence,” their website states.

However, the company relies heavily on primary residence licenses to circumvent local bylaws prohibiting commercial short-term rental operations. A majority of the primary residence licenses being used by Stanzia are in the name of the company’s shareholders, administrators, or their family members. 

The problem is that they likely don’t actually live there.

Nicolas Larose, listed as a primary shareholder of the company with an address in Blainville, uses a primary residence CITQ license for a property located on Notre-Dame St. in Montreal’s Little Burgundy neighborhood. 

When contacted by phone, Larose adamantly claimed that he lives at the Notre-Dame residence. “Notre-Dame I own, it’s my residence,” he said by phone. When questioned about the property’s seemingly unlimited availability online, he doubled down. “It’s the company that manages my place when I travel,” he said. 

“I’m here in Quebec seven, eight months a year,” he said, confirming that he stays at the apartment. “That’s my place, that’s my stuff, everything’s here.” 

The Airbnb reviews tell a different story.

Larose also doesn’t own the building, as he claims. The apartment, on paper, is owned by 9247-2497 Quebec Inc., which is administered by real-estate mogul Edouard El-Kaim, his wife Adrienne Choran, and a company registered to Zvi Zaffir of Amcor Holdings. 

There have been multiple renters every month since June 2022 staying in the apartment Larose claims is his primary residence.

Coincidentally, five of the eight primary residence CITQ licenses relied upon by Stanzia and its representatives are located in buildings owned by El-Kaim.

Who will enforce the law?

Jean Teotonio, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Tourism, said verification of primary residence applications is a shared responsibility between the ministry and municipalities. “No registration is issued for a principal residence establishment without the municipality first confirming that the proposed principal residence tourist accommodation does not contravene municipal regulations,” he said.

A spokesperson for the city of Montreal claimed that, while the city does review these applications, without the proper tools to check the validity of primary residences, the new regulations don’t really have any teeth. “It’s crazy to have so many short-term rentals, but when people come to the city to [apply] … we don’t have [access to] the register of primary residence [with Revenue Quebec]. It’s all by good faith for now.”

• Watch our ride-a-long uncovering illegal Airbnbs with Canada’s first squad dedicated to short-term rental inspections

To complicate matters even further, it is Revenue Quebec’s responsibility to enforce the law, which imposes fines not only on landlords but also on the platforms that host the listings. 

As of August 1st, Revenue Quebec had given out nearly $5 million in fines over the past year, but not one fine has been issued to Airbnb or its competitors since the law was updated, despite the continued presence of illegal listings on the sites. Ricochet filed a freedom of information request with Revenue Quebec for each complaint it has received regarding suspected illegal short-term rental operations, but the agency denied our request.

Meanwhile, Montreal residents attempting to flag short-term rentals that violate local by-laws to their borough are being directed to Revenu Quebec. 

Lawyer Manuel Johnson, an attorney with the Montreal firm Ouellet Nadon & Associates, said not enough is being done to prevent the negative effects of short-term rentals on tenants.“As long as we allow them to operate, they will always find ways to extract maximum value by circumventing the law, dancing around its grey zones, taking advantage of the under-staffed and under-financed permit and inspections departments of municipalities,” said Johnson. “The speculator-friendly CAQ prohibited municipalities from completely banning short-term rentals on their territory. Municipalities can certainly do more, but they are deprived of the tools and powers to be able to do more.”

 “The provincial government… should not be granting permits to essentially destroy the social fabric of neighbourhoods and force people into homelessness,” he said.   “It’s simple. Just ban them completely. Companies like Airbnb should be completely shut down.”