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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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Another legislation trying to fix a very broken rental ecosystem in Ontario. Problem #1 is rent control. If ON adopted AB's model they wouldn't have these issues -
What does AB do differently? We DONT have rent control, the rent is controlled by supply and demand as it should be. The only restriction is that a LL cant raise the rent more than once in a 365 day period, but there is no limit on how much it can be raised unless its obviously punitive. Eg 100 a month raise is acceptable, 1000 a month is obviously punitive and likely to be disallowed by our Residential Tenancy Dispute Resolution Service, a quasi judicial body that unlike ON's LTB is NOT broken and is NOT inundated with so many cases that its failing under its own weight. Here, a LL can evict a tenant who refuses to pay in less than a month. None of this 6 month wait baloney and then two postponements as the tenant games the system and continues to destroy the property. In AB if there is proof of wilful vandalism the eviction period is 24 hours. We dont put up with that bs.
What does demand pricing mean? It means when demand is way up, as it has been in the last 3 years in Calgary, a LL can raise the rent to whatever the market will bear. It ALSO means that when demand cools as it has in the last few months, that rents DROP in relation to demand. Overall rents have dropped almost 10% year over year.
This takes away the problem of a LL knowing that their rental is underpriced by hundreds of dollars a month and resorting to shady renoviction tactics to try and raise it. Demand pricing works and it works well.
All rent control does is create temporary solutions for tenants that eventually frustrate landlords and cause issues. Free market supply and demand is a far superior system. And for those on the bottom end of income we still have some subsidized housing and low income housing so they're not completely priced out although admittedly there will always be more demand for low income housing than the province can supply.
That’s stupid. Newer buildings in Toronto don’t have rent control already and abide by the same rules as Alberta. The problem is that they price you low to get you in the door and then jack up the rent by hundreds of dollars the next year to extort you. Either pay through the nose or leave.
What that gets you is people who have no long term place because there’s no stability. No community forms because there’s just a cycle of the next group being taken advantage of.
Owners don’t have their yearly fees dictated by the market. They have stability.
Rent should be set to the carrying cost of the unit, sometimes slightly below to account for equity gains. Housing isn’t an investment vehicle and if you’re going to treat it like one inflationary increases are definitely sufficient to squat on property while it gains equity.
Landlords can set the price appropriately on the initial lease, raise to whatever they want between tenants, and can get approved above guideline increases. I have never seen year-over-year prices lower in the same unit and what you’re doing is leaving the fate of an entire class of people at the whims of random individuals with all the power to extract as much as they possibly can from them for the sake of the “free market”.
Also Ontarios LTB is ‘broken’ because it’s been underfunded for years and our current conservative government refuses to expand. Ontarios population has grown rapidly over the last few decades and so has the population of renters. The LTBs service has essentially remained the same. That means that they do not have capacity to handle the population resulting in long wait times that make both sides of the table unhappy.
You're talking about rent manipulation by a corporate landlord. Those of us 'mom and pop' landlords have no desire to get people in a place and then jack the rate only to have to replace them again the next year. Stability, even if rent is slightly below market rent, is FAR more desirable and much more beneficial financially. Tenants moving out incurs our biggest expenses and costs, so no one wants to make that happen and one month of a unit sitting empty waiting for a new tenant easily wipes out any increase in rent so we generally avoid that as much as possible.
There's a happy medium where both tenant and landlord are happy and I find that to be when rents are 50 to 80 under fair market rent. If tenants know they're getting a decent deal and that moving is likely to not only cost them moving costs PLUS higher rent, they'll stay around, which works for both of us. Through in some advantages like allowing pets with no additional fees and they'll stay a LONG time.
Weird because I’ve seen this exclusively from Mom & Pop landlords. Plenty of “mom and pops” personal-use evict their tenants all the time. There is arguably more stability from corporate landlords who do not have that option. You may be one of the “good ones” but it’s an extremely unbalanced relationship, and you are still squatting on an asset that someone needs for human life, extracting money that pays for you to do so, all while you gain equity.
Stability for both parties is always better and that’s what these legal protections do, they force the bad apples to comply.
Pet Bans have extremely limited standing in Ontario. It’s either condo boards, shared living space with your landlord, or directly impacting other tenants.
There are many people who dont want to buy a house who rent, eg university students, couples who just started living together, separated and going through a divorce, employees on a temporary work assignment, those would rather invest in stocks rather than buy, people with no interest in home maintenance, etc) So who should they rent from? From a corporate body that needs to pay for a CEO, an office staff, a maintenance crew, a legal department AND still makes a profit to pay shareholders on top of all of that.
Or just me? Who does all of those jobs for a lot less overhead? Which is why mom and pops are necessary. We rent the lowest cost housing in the market, typically basement suites. Corporations dont invest in basement suites. So where do the low income renters move?
Explain how Im "squatting" by renting out a basement suite for 1280 when the average rental for a one bed apartment in my city is 1600 and to BUY the house would take 4000 a month.
Mom and pops do more than just rent out basement suites. A lot of people own condos that they use for rental property and a lot extract as much rent as they can. Raising the prices of those early entrances homes.
We used to have government built supportive housing that has RGI rentals. These largely stopped being built by the mid 90s. There are options like coops, and plain old purpose built rentals that have valuations planned out over decades. That is where low income people are supposed to live, not underground.
Corporate landlords pay for that because that’s what it takes to upkeep a building. Otherwise you do what a lot of condos do which is hire agencies that exploit low payed recent immigrants. Buildings require money to upkeep and maintain. Mom and pops often delay repairs, repair with unqualified technicians, or go for the cheapest options. They are also more likely to violate people’s boundaries, as many young female renters can attest to. Further mom and pops frequently violate rights by banning stuff like alcohol, guests, and whatever behaviour they feel like because they bank on people not knowing their rights.
Mom and pops largely exist because Canada abandoned traditional savings programs like pensions as well as building social housing. This shift led to the rise of the mom and pop landlord where housing would appreciate drastically and new comers and the young would have their wealth extracted to fuel boomer and gen-X retirements. This has also systematically removed them from housing market as it further became a commodity.
You are not performing a charity by “allowing” someone to live, literally below you, for $1280/mo. Had “mom and pops” not over invested into the market then perhaps that person could afford an apartment, a condo, or even a starter home.
And therein lies the fallacy. Why do you think there is SO much demand for housing in Canada and so little building? We WERE a nation of 32 million just 20 years years ago. Now we are a nation of 40 million. So 8 million people came here seeking housing and yet we've barely been able to build fast enough to keep up with PAST immigration rates let alone the current rates on steroids. What happens when 8 million NEW people are seeking housing when there is already a shortage for the 32 million who already lived here? And you think its mom and pops who raised prices?
How about building costs? When I did my first contractor hired renovation only about 15 years ago, the general contractors were quoting rates about 240 a sq ft. So if you wanted a modest 1200 sq ft bungalow you were looking at 228,000 for building costs. Now they quote about 320 a sq ft in my city. So the same house is now 384,000 to build. And thats just the main floor, the basement is extra as is the cost of the lot.
So where is that extra 160,000 for building costs going? Well, if you look at the most profitable companies on the stock exchange, guess who's in the top twenty? Good ol Home Depot. Right up there with the Walmarts, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft. Because building supplies have skyrocketed and they are pocketing massive margins.
The demand was also pushed hard due to historically low interest rates hovering some as low as 1.5% in 2020. But now, just 5 years later the rates have tripled to 4.5%. Which means a mortgage on a 700k house WAS $2800 but now that same mortgage will cost a landlord $3900, over 1000 a month more.
Im not providing a charity. I run a business and I provide safe warm comfortable housing for a VERY reasonable cost to people who never have to worry about interest rates, building supply costs, or how to fix the broken fridge or the leak in the window. And if I sold my house there's no way my renters could afford to buy it, therefore Im going to continue to provide their housing as a service just like any other service.
By the way theres nothing stopping any renter group from starting and building a coop. All it takes is initiative and organization. From forty years of observation, Ive noted that renters would rather protest about their landlords than get off their butts and actually be proactive. Thats not mom and pops fault.