For rent: Mapping price growth for apartment rentals across Toronto

Photo: Trevor Pritchard/Flickr

If you rent, you understand the acute pain that comes with combing through Craigslist ads at length, only to settle for an apartment that’s barely okay-ish. After year after year of climbing rents, new numbers from the CMHC suggest not exactly relief for renters, but a very slight slowing of year-over-year increases in lease rates.

Between 2013 and 2012, the average rent for a Toronto apartment went up 2.81 per cent to $1,134 a month (Tweet this). Compare that to between 2011 and 2012, when the rent rose by 3.37 per cent, from $1,067 to $1,103.

Here are a few other things we learned about the Toronto rental market by looking through the CMHC’s numbers:

  • Overall, the vacancy rate in Toronto proper sits at 1.6 per cent, slightly tighter than the 1.7 per cent rate recorded in 2012.
  • In Central Toronto, the vacancy rate reached 1.7 per cent in fall 2013, an improvement over the impossibly low rate of 0.8 per cent in 2012 (Tweet this).
  • Looking back at CMHC stats all the way to 1992, the lowest vacancy rate recorded in the city was in 2000, when it reached a rate of 0.6 per cent (Tweet this).

We looked into neighbourhood numbers as well to see what it’ll cost you to rent a bachelor apartment, a one-bedroom or two-bedroom apartment in different corners of Toronto. While downtown renting has turned into something of a blood sport, the number show that some of the biggest leaps in price were actually in ‘burbs like Central Etobicoke.

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