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So we listed our home with a reputable real estate agency for $4,000 a month. And they soon came back with what looked like a great tenant: Jesse Gubb worked in sales and drove a Range Rover. His rental application showed a solid income and high credit rating. He listed himself, his girlfriend, brother and father as the occupants of the house. “Family is moving back together,” he stated.

His offer came after I’d flown to Doha with our three kids – and while I was starting a new job, getting our daughters into school and looking for a place to live. But confident our real estate agency had done its job to vet him, we signed the lease with Gubb and forged ahead with our new lives.

That was the day our luck ran out.

In the beginning, nothing seemed amiss. Gubb’s rent cheques cleared punctually. Over email he struck all the right notes: polite, responsible, diligent. “Moving is difficult and we are finally feeling settled in. I really had my work cut out for me keeping up with the neighbours and the leaf blowers … I picked up one of my own … and all looks great,” he wrote.

But within a few months we would learn that Gubb didn’t live in our house. Instead, he had converted our four-bedroom semi into an illegal rooming house and was subletting to as many as 16 people.

The news came in an email last March from our friend Sarah Fulford, the editor of Toronto Life magazine. She’d received a pitch about the rise of the rooming house in the city’s tight rental market. The writer, Kat Shermack, had visited a number of them, apparently run – and owned – by the same guy. But a property title search at city hall revealed otherwise. All of the homes actually belonged to other people, mostly married couples, many of whom lived out of town.