Rent dispute question
My partner and I have been renting out a unit in Vancouver for a year (12 month lease terminated end of June). Our rent for that time was $X.
With the appropriate notice our landlord (who is a property manager, but is the individual who signed and initialed our lease without mention of being a representative for another individual with authority) presented us with a rent increase notice, to $X + 50.
We told them we wouldn’t pay that and towards the end of May provided written notice to vacate.
Our landlord / property manager then called us into their office to negotiate. By the end of the negotiation, we had managed to talk them down to $X - $150, on a month to month contract. I had the landlord send us an email confirming this, and responded to the email saying we agree.
A few weeks later they asked us to submit a notice to the accountant / the landlords boss so they can draft the amendment to our lease.
I submitted this on Monday the 29th of June. This is probably too late, but by my understanding this was just to amend an existing contract in line with an agreement. Note that I did not phrase the email as a request, I titled it a notice and made explicit reference to the fact we already had a written agreement and was simply informing them of this fact so they can proceed with whatever they need to do to produce a new lease.
Apparently, this is not the case. My landlord has told us that they were never given authority to make binding agreements, and that their boss has rejected the rent decrease of $150 and only approved a decrease of $50. Mind you we were never told about this.
Not that never has our landlord mentioned that they did not have this authority, in fact I explicitly remember asking to be sure that this was official and there is no way that the owner can reject it. They said that was the case. I’ve read over our lease agreement and there is no mention of this dynamic either. They even told me verbally that this is the first time ever during their tenure at this job that a proposed rent change they agreed to has been rejected by their boss, so it seems even *they* did not know this was possible.
So on July 2nd our landlord tells my partner that our ‘request’ was rejected, and says that they will have to go and communicate with the owner to see if they can resolve the issue.
They asked us if they can propose X - $150 for a full year term rather than month to month so they are more likely to convince the owner.
I told them they need to first make clear that they made an agreement with us. The only way we would consider a year is if they completely rejected it AND we were informed that the email he sent is not legally binding to a new contract, otherwise we would take them to the RTB.
So the question is - are we correct in thinking the email they wrote is legally binding, for the landlord and the owner? Does the email correspondence and the fact that we were never told that our landlord doesn’t have the authority to approve rent alterations ensure that we are entitled to $X-$150 on a month to month basis?
If it’s not a guaranteed entitlement, does it seem that we would have a strong case with the RTB?
Thanks for any input.
TLDR: landlord agreed in writing to a particular rent reduction on month to month term, without communicating it was possible that this change was rejected by the owner of the building. The agreement was apparently rejected. Do we have a reasonable legal case if we went to the RTB?