Joseph Nimens, the owner of the controversial floating home company Live On The Bay (LOTB), was recently charged $19,000 after being found guilty of unlawfully placing four floating accommodations on the Georgian Bay. The ruling is the latest in a six-year saga involving outraged cottagers, swindled buyers, and all three levels of government.
On top of the hefty fine, Nimens was ordered to remove the floating homes, which an investigation by conservation officers revealed had sat on the waters of the Georgian Bay near the Town of Port Severn from May 2024 to February 2025. “During this time, Nimens occasionally moved the floating accommodations, which were observed in six different locations for varying periods ranging from 20 to 99 days. This included the winter months, when the structures froze in place,” says the press release from the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR).
The trial took place in early 2026, with the decision handed down in May 2026 and final sentencing occurring in September 2026.
What Nimens did is illegal under the province’s Public Lands Act, but this wasn’t always the case, and the ignominious floating homebuilder’s business venture played a key role in changing that.
Starting around 2020, Nimens started building floating homes constructed out of shipping containers. They were supposed to be affordable, tax-free alternatives to multi-million-dollar waterfront cottage properties but with no shoreline to maintain, no driveway to shovel, no maintenance, and no bills, as marketed on his still live LOTB website.
But as the industrial-looking floating accommodations started cropping up along the Georgian Bay, cottagers began to complain, raising concerns around greywater and blackwater waste hazards and calling the homes ugly.
Several municipalities took notice and pushed back as well, but there was a problem. Nimens had registered the floating homes as vessels with Transport Canada, which regulates the movement of vessels on the surface of the water. This meant that the municipalities, which cover land use and provide services, and the province, which is responsible for lake beds and Crown land, had no say in the matter.
To close this legal loophole, the province stepped in, and in June 2023, it updated its Public Lands Act, prohibiting floating accommodations from camping out on water over provincial Crown land. Armed with new regulatory authority, MNR conservation officers launched the investigation that would result in Nimens’s early-September sentencing.
LOTB has also been the subject of buyer allegations regarding stolen deposits and unfulfilled orders which began to emerge in 2024. The amounts owed range from $30,000 to more than $168,000, leading several of Nimens’s former customers to accuse him of fraud and file complaints with police and consumer advocacy groups. But as of now, no formal criminal fraud charges have been laid against Nimens or his company by law enforcement.
For his part, Nimens has made public statements denying fraudulent activities and blaming project delays on the newly introduced regulatory hurdles and clients requesting to alter designs after construction had already begun.
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