Better Business Bureau award winner a real head shaker

I just came across a few-weeks-old news release (October 25) from the Better Business Bureau of Mainland B.C. that trumpeted the 2013 winners of its annual Torch awards.

The awards, bestowed upon various companies during a celebration at the Four Seasons Hotel the evening before, showcase "how good business practice can help to build better communities", according to the BBB release.

One of the award recipients, though, would have prompted a "spit take", as film folk call it, had I been sipping my coffee at the time.

In the category of "community excellence—large category", the winner is identified as Hollyburn Properties Ltd., the "largest owner-operator of rental properties in British Columbia", as it dubs itself.

Now, I’m sure the company does its bit in terms of all the usual humanitarian gestures and charitable donations that most large companies do.

In fact, in one of its own blog posts the very next day, it spoke about how it subsidized an "inner-city alternative program" in a West End school, sponsored gardens, and made available some furnished apartments for at-risk youth.

Good on ya, I say.

But in my memory, and, I’m sure, in many other people’s as well, the name Hollyburn is synonymous with the Vancouver-invented term renovictions.

This stems from its involvement in many well-publicized cases over the years of its tenants, sometimes seniors, ill, or disabled renters, receiving eviction notices for so-called renovations and then seeing the rents for their apartments zoom upwards, sometimes doubling.

At least one case, Bay Tower, went to Supreme Court, and Hollyburn lost. Then there were Emerald Terrace, Reid Manor, Glenmore Apartments...

Google Hollyburn and evictions or complaints and see for yourselves.

The Better Business Bureau website claims to have received only three complaints about Hollyburn in the past three years, all resolved.

Maybe that, and its corporate good deeds, were enough to qualify it for its "community excellence" award. Hollyburn’s own blog says the award recognizes its "business ethics, honesty, and integrity".

A separate, May 24, 2013, blog post by Hollyburn itself notes, though, that a research study found that "96% of customers don’t complain when they have a problem".

Maybe the BBB should have checked with the B.C. Residential Tenancy Branch.

Or used Google.

Hollyburn has been in the property-management business for 40 years now. As Bethany Lindsay reported in the North Shore News in 2010: "Complaints about rent increases and evictions at buildings owned by West Vancouver’s Hollyburn Property Ltd. date back at least as far as 1981, according to legislative transcripts uncovered by housing activists."

She continued: "In a June 1981 transcript from the B.C. legislature, NDP MLA Gary Lauk advocated for an elderly woman who had been evicted from her suite in a Hollyburn building on Beach Avenue.

"The transcript provided that the woman had received notice that the $700 rent on her one-bedroom-plus-den apartment would nearly double.…Then-Minister of Consumer and Corporate Affairs Peter Hyndman answered that the ministry was in the process of investigating Hollyburn, ‘on the basis of a series of reports received by my office from various quarters alleging what appear to be unconscionable rent increases.’ "

Has this particular leopard changed its spots? Who knows?

But I do know one thing: I’m putting my coffee down the next time a BBB release crosses my desk.