This week’s question comes from Sue (paraphrased): 

I am renting out a property that has six bedrooms. For the purpose of the Residential Tenancies Act, is it irrefutably a boarding house or can it be a normal residential rental?

Our response: 

To answer this question, we first look at the definitions of both boarding house and boarding house tenancy per the Residential
Tenancies Act (the RTA):

Section 66B defines a boarding house as residential premises that ‘[contain] 1 or more boarding rooms along with facilities for communal use by
the tenants of the boarding house; and occupied, or intended by the landlord to be occupied, by at least 6 tenants at a time. A boarding house tenancy ‘means
a residential tenancy in a boarding house that is intended to, or that does in fact, last for 28 days or more; and under which the tenant is granted
exclusive rights to occupy particular sleeping quarters in the boarding house, and has the right to the shared use of the facilities of the boarding
house.’

To us, the key components of a boarding house tenancy are thus: 

  1. That the property has at least one boarding room; 
  2. That the property capable of or intended (by the landlord) to be occupied by 6 or more tenants at a time;
  3. That all tenancies are intended to be longer than 28 days; and
  4. That all tenants have exclusive rights to occupy their own boarding room (or, put in a more straightforward manner, that tenants do not have the right
    to enter boarding rooms that are not their own). 
The prima facie presumption for a house with six or more bedrooms is that it is a boarding house offering boarding house tenancies. The rebuttal comes
from a...