Most Montreal multiplex owners have never seen a real income statement for their building. They have a vague sense of monthly rents collected, an even vaguer sense of expenses, and an annual conversation with their accountant in March that produces a tax return without ever producing operating insight.
This is the gap we close. And in the process of closing it, we typically find $6,000 to $12,000 of unrealized annual NOI on every triplex we audit. Almost always from the same three sources.
Source one: Rent below market by 5–15%
Quebec's rent control regime constrains how fast a landlord can raise rent on a sitting tenant — but it does not constrain what rent you can charge on a new lease, and it does not freeze indefinitely the rent on a tenant who renews. Most small landlords either do not file the annual notice of increase on time, file it for a token amount they think is "safe," or file nothing because they are not certain of the procedure.
Compounded over five years, a triplex rent set 8% below market is leaving roughly $4,000–6,000 per year on the table at current Montreal pricing. The fix is procedural: file the annual notice on time, on the correct form, with the correct math.
Source two: Vacancy gaps that should not exist
The average small Montreal multiplex experiences 3–5 weeks of vacancy per turnover. With 1–2 turnovers per year per unit, this represents $1,000–2,000 of lost rent per turnover. Most of that loss is avoidable.
A unit listed two weeks before the previous tenant vacates, with photographs commissioned the day the unit was confirmed available, with applications screened in real time rather than batched, can typically achieve under one week of vacancy on most Montreal product types. The math: you save 2–4 weeks of rent per turnover. On a $1,800/month unit, that is $900–1,800 per turnover.
Source three: Deferred maintenance compounding into capex
The cracked tile that should have been replaced for $80 becomes a $1,200 bathroom partial-renovation when the underlying subfloor finally rots. The dripping faucet that needed a $25 cartridge becomes an $800 plumbing call when the corroded valve finally fails.
Most small landlords defer maintenance because they hate doing it. The total cost of every deferral, summed across a five-year hold, regularly exceeds 10% of building value. Disciplined quarterly maintenance — addressing every issue under $200 within 30 days — is one of the highest-leverage operational improvements available to a small landlord.
What this looks like in practice
A typical Plateau triplex audit, summed across all three sources:
- Rent capture: +$4,800/year
- Vacancy reduction: +$2,400/year
- Avoided deferred-maintenance compounding: +$3,000/year (capex-equivalent)
Total annual uplift: approximately $10,200, on a building producing perhaps $50,000 in gross rents. None of it requires renovation. None of it requires evicting tenants. All of it requires operational discipline that most owners cannot apply to a side asset while running their primary career.
That gap is what Shaikh Property Partners closes.