Tuesday, 8:40 AM, renewals week. The sheet says unit 306 is eligible, and the tab you opened to double-check says what every Alberta landlord page says: no limit on rent increases. You pencil a number into the September column, feel briefly grateful to be operating somewhere sensible, and move on to the parkade that flooded overnight.
That tab is why Alberta portfolios get casual. Freedom on the amount reads as freedom in general, and it is not. The rules Alberta does keep are the absolute kind. One increase in any 365 days, counted from the last one, and the regulation says in as many words that no agreement to the contrary changes it. Three full tenancy months of notice, which is not the same as ninety days: a notice that goes out three days past the month boundary does not lose three days, it loses the whole month. And the paper itself has a short list of things it must carry, a date, a signature, the day the new rent starts, with a consequence most markets reserve for far bigger sins. Miss one, and the notice is void.
Void is a different word than late. A defective notice in British Columbia gets picked up by the statute and moved to the next lawful date; the process forgives, at a price. Alberta does not move your notice anywhere. A void notice never happened. The old rent kept running underneath it the entire time, and every extra dollar the resident paid under it is theirs to claim back, months of it, in one action. Nothing about this fails loudly. The higher rent arrives, the ledger looks right, the file looks full, and the operation runs for half a year on an increase that legally does not exist. The unsigned notice is not a typo in the file. It is a debt accruing in someone else's favor.
A bad notice in Alberta is not late. It never happened.
The quieter loss compounds the same way. Because the next window is measured from the last increase, a month of drift this cycle is a month every future cycle inherits; anniversaries only ever move backward. Run that across a portfolio where every lease keeps its own clock and its own serve-by date, and the honest description of Alberta is not "no rules." It is a market that outsourced all of its enforcement to your calendar.
Here is what changes when the increase is a scheduled event instead of a sheet: the decision stops living at the anniversary and starts living three months earlier, where the law actually put it. A September rent is decided by May. The serve-by dates surface when they are still actionable, the notice cannot leave without the things that make it real, and the question in renewals week becomes the one Alberta genuinely left to you, what the number should be, instead of the one it did not, whether the paperwork will hold.
That is what Scaalr's Alberta profile runs: each increase scheduled on its lease with your explicit percentage, the timing validated against the twelve-month window and the notice floor, the written notice composed with the date, signature, and effective date Alberta requires, held until it is signed, and service recorded as a task with proof attached. The full rulebook, the clocks, the tenancy-month arithmetic, and the void rule, is here: Alberta Rent Increases: No Cap, a Twelve-Month Rule, and Real Notice Periods.
For the complete guide to the 365-day rule, the notice floors, and what a void notice costs, see: Alberta Rent Increases: No Cap, a Twelve-Month Rule, and Real Notice Periods.
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