After two years of waiting and $168,000 spent, Ronda Kemp has concluded that she’s been scammed. Back in 2022, Ronda, 66 at the time, and a retired nurse, packed up her life in Alberta, and, along with her husband, Paul, moved to Port Severn, Ont., to take care of her aging mother.
Their plan upon arriving was to buy a float home from a local company she’d read about, Live On The Bay (LOTB). They’d spend their retirement cruising around Georgian Bay. “It sounded wonderful, the whole concept of being able to live there all season,” says Ronda. (At the time, float homes didn’t have so much controversy surrounding them; this has since changed—more on that below.)
LOTB’s website shows a range of float home options, from shipping containers planted on docks to double-decker-looking cottages. Pricing varies by model with the cheapest around $97,000 and the most expensive at $1.6 million. The site also claims that the float homes have no hydro bills, no water bills, and no maintenance, while being in compliance with all municipal, provincial, and federal laws.
Won over by the look of the float homes online, Ronda approached the owners of LOTB, Joe Nimens and his partner, Erin Morano, and told them she was interested in buying. They talked specifications. Ronda wanted a wood-frame home, not a shipping container. Nimens and Morano drew up a contract that stipulated the float home would be completed in six months. To get started, Nimens required a down payment; the couple paid Nimens and Morano $168,000.
“I gave him incremental money upon the contract request, and I was proud to do it because I had cash. I thought, ‘This is great,’” says Ronda.
Meanwhile, Ronda and Paul were staying in rented cottages around Port Severn and Honey Harbour, the rent eating into their savings while they looked after Ronda’s mother and waited for their float home to be built.
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To help finance their stay, Paul, a builder by trade, started working for Nimens on the float homes. At the time, LOTB was building float homes out of a warehouse near the Port Severn Marina. Ronda remembers seeing a partially built float home in the warehouse and a second, bigger one on land outside, promised to another buyer.
Her first red flag that something might be amiss with LOTB was that Paul often didn’t receive his weekly wage. “We’d have to harass [Nimens] for the pay, and I would say things to him like, “We’ve given you a substantial amount of money. I should think you would give Paul his weekly wage,” she says.
Even more distressing was that by the six-month mark, little work had been done on her own float home. According to Ronda, LOTB did build and launch two float homes into the water during that six-month period. Supposedly, one of the float homes was promised to a couple in Barrie, but Ronda says she never saw them take ownership. Instead, Nimens and Morano dragged the two float homes around Georgian Bay behind their own float home.
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At one point, while visiting LOTB’s workspace, Ronda witnessed Nimens sell the early structure of her float home to another buyer. When she called him on it, he brushed her off. “In fact, he referred me to a new company that would make my float home. They work on making sustainable housing for the homeless down in Niagara Falls,” she says. “He kept saying it would be no extra expense. So, I said, ‘Well, transporting a home up to Port Severn is going to be quite expensive.’ ‘Oh no, you’ll have no extra cost.’ It was all manipulation.”
By this point, Ronda was frustrated and unhappy. Her mother had died over the summer, and, during this time, Ronda discovered that there were approximately 10 other buyers waiting on float homes from LOTB. “The whole group of us, each of us individually had our awareness and our awakening at different times, so it was hard for us to try and do a class-action lawsuit,” Ronda explains. “We were in denial. We were not believing this was happening.”
In one final attempt to get her money back, Ronda confronted Nimens and Morano. “I marched over to see Joe right at the lot where they were building the float homes, and Joe blatantly said to me, with a big smile on his face, ‘You’re never going to get your money back.’”
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Flash forward to the present: after briefly moving back to Alberta, Ronda and Paul have managed to scrape together some additional funds and are now renting a cabin in Port Severn. She’s hired a lawyer to sue LOTB; she expects the next time she’ll see Nimens is in court. But in the meantime, she’s worried about where she and Paul will spend the winter. Buying in Georgian Bay is out of their price range, and rent and the lawyer are quickly burning through their expenses. “Our life is starting to feel like there’s no hope,” she says.
When asked to comment on the allegations, Nimens said in an email: “It has been challenging to keep up with demand and construction schedules are longer than hoped. Everyone will get what they paid for.”
However, even if all buyers do eventually get their float homes, there could be further hurdles on the horizon: municipal governments in the area, along with the provincial and federal governments are cracking down on floating accommodations.
In July 2023, the Ontario government banned floating accommodations from anchoring on provincial waterways. In December 2023, Transport Canada sought public opinion on tightening restrictions around long-term anchoring for floating accommodations. On March 6, 2024, the Township of Severn amended its bylaws to ban floating accommodations from anchoring on public land. And on May 1, 2024, Parks Canada banned floating accommodations from mooring on the Trent-Severn Canal and Rideau Canal without a permit.
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