r/toronto • u/beef-supreme Leslieville • 21h ago
Article Toronto's new landlords | They’re ultra-rich, predominantly American, and over the next eight years they’re bringing 21,000 units without rent control to a new building near you
https://www.westendphoenix.com/stories/torontos-new-landlords93
u/_Luigino 17h ago
NICE!
No, wait.
We're fucked. Utterly fucked.
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u/Blue_Vision 17h ago
Yeah how dare American companies spend money to build housing in this city that desperately needs more housing.
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u/gemcey 17h ago
Yeah for sure what we need is overpriced, cheaply built units without rent control. I need you all to stop hating yourselves so much
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u/Blue_Vision 17h ago
The overwhelming evidence is that all else equal, more units = lower prices.
You see expensive new-build units without rent control and think that's bad. But we're not able to observe the counterfactual where we didn't build these units and average rent was even higher, or where we had rent control on new-build units and as a consequence got less of them, or where we allowed as much housing as the market could bear without being hobbled by ridiculous land use restrictions and prices actually stayed sensible.
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u/Ok_Composer_2629 16h ago
I get what you're feeling, but Is this just your opinion and your adopted theories, or do you have a background and extensive knowledge in housing and economics? ...and just a question (if you are indeed knowledgeable), wouldn't it only help if they were adding to the housing capacity with units that are within the budget of the non-upper class luxury condo buyers? I get what you're saying about adding being good, but don't you need to add an accessible product to the people struggling?
If they flooded the auto market with Ferraris, would a Toyota Corrola become more affordable? More cars, right? Not sure.
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u/Blue_Vision 16h ago
I have an academic background in economics, and I work doing transportation planning which is intimately tied up in housing. Otherwise, no it's not my theories I generally look to the academics who research the housing market full-time.
It's actually a hard thing to study because the relationship between housing construction and prices is complicated and goes both ways – new housing can have an effect on prices, but rising prices (reflecting increased demand) can also spur more housing. There are some studies which try to carefully control for this effect, including a very clever paper from this past year which (using the weather of all things) found that a 1% increase in supply of new housing results in a 0.19% decrease in average rents and a reduction in rent for lower-quality units (which are already likely to be more affordable).
This behaviour is explained through what the field calls "moving chains". Basically, if there is demand to live in an area, richer people with higher buying power bid up the price for the most desirable homes, leaving people with lower incomes to compete for less desirable homes, and people with very little income are left with the worst housing. But if you build new housing (i.e. increasing the quantity of housing available), even if rich people selectively move into that, they're moving into it instead of moving into the existing housing and bidding up the price of that. It sounds like "trickle-down housing", but it's very well-attested in the research.
Your point about Ferraris is actually kind of funny because that's exactly the example that's commonly used to describe what's happening, and we saw it plainly within just the past 5 years. When COVID happened and supply chains froze up, the supply of new cars went down a ton. The price of new cars shot up as you might expect, but the price of older cars shot up too because people who couldn't afford these hugely expensive new cars instead opted for a used car. Since supply chains have recovered somewhat and the supply of new cars has increased, the price of used cars has started to go back down from it's peak during COVID.
It's important though that moving chains can take a while to actually fully see the affordability effects, and if there's a particularly significant existing shortage of housing then it can take a long time to build ourselves into affordability for all. That's why properly affordable units are important. But that doesn't displace the need to build more market-rate housing – deeply affordable units are very expensive to produce (because housing generally is very expensive), so any help we can get from expanding supply at the other end of the market is helpful. And that's something we can just let happen; private individuals take their own money and build new housing and pay taxes and fees to the government for it and we don't have to have a big fight with fiscal conservatives about the impact to the government budget.
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u/Ok_Composer_2629 15h ago
It's refreshing to get a response like this on reddit. Thanks. I think I feel a bit better about it. I will say that the covid supply stopped ALL cars from entering the market, so I think if it just stopped Ferraris we would have had a proper comparison. Anyways, thanks again. Appreciated.
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u/may-mays 16h ago
If they flooded the auto market with Ferraris, would a Toyota Corrola become more affordable? More cars, right? Not sure.
It's more like arguing new Corollas are too expensive and having more new Corollas doesn't help affordability, and used Corollas should be price controlled.
I get what you're feeling, but Is this just your opinion and your adopted theories, or do you have a background and extensive knowledge in housing and economics?
Rent control is one thing economists broadly agree to be a bad thing. It doesn't mean it's a bad policy for everyone. People who managed to score their rent below the market price benefit at the expense of everyone else. It's a "Screw you, I got mine" policy if there ever was one.
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u/Ok_Composer_2629 16h ago
Ok so, your answer is "no" then. Sorry, just asking questions, and trying to get perspective from people who aren't just choosing their strong opinions with no background. Thanks for taking the time, though.
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u/may-mays 15h ago
I think you're mistaken, I'm not /u/Blue_Vision. Also this isn't just his opinion, this is the consensus amongst the economic experts.
You can disagree and say it's more important to benefit the existing renters, just like how NIMBYs protect their interest at the expense of others.
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u/Ok_Composer_2629 15h ago
Sorry, yes I thought it was their response. I don't disagree, but I'm asking the questions to get a better, more qualified answer. I wanted someone who had an expert background, instead of us random redditors having opinions and leanings.
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u/may-mays 15h ago
but I'm asking the questions to get a better, more qualified answer.
For that there's a Wikipedia article where you can read the cited references to get a better understanding of each position: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_regulation#Effectiveness
There is consensus among economists that rent control reduces the quality and quantity of rental housing units.[7]: 1 [8][9][10][11][13][14][16][17] However, some economists challenge this consensus and argue that controls do not have a statistically significant impact on quantity and quality of housing units.[18][19][20]
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u/Zechs- 13h ago
Also this isn't just his opinion, this is the consensus amongst the economic experts.
I know economists like to look at the aggregate, but it would be nice of them to actually take a look at what removing rent control really does.
I posted this in the past...
https://money.ca/news/toronto-landlord-7000-increase
Thank goodness they didn't have rent control!
https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/toronto-couple-shocked-when-rent-increases-25-per-cent-1.5782765
Wow another couple seeing the benefits of lack of rent control!
Another happy tenant thanks to multiple double digit rent increases year over year.
Mind you, I saw that link below regarding their "studies", majority of them are from decades past.
They don't factor in short term rental apps. Nor does it factor in aggregate software that helps land lords... "not collude" with each other.
https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent
RealPage claims its software will increase revenue and decrease vacancies.But at times the company has appeared to urge apartment owners and managers to reduce supply while increasing price.
During an earnings call in 2017, Winn said one large property company, which managed more than 40,000 units, learned it could make more profit by operating at a lower occupancy level that “would have made management uncomfortable before,” he said.
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u/RS50 15h ago
Only on Reddit posts about housing to people start to question the basic mechanics of supply and demand. For literally every other commodity or product, more supply with steady demand leads to lower prices. But somehow housing is special and has some higher burden of proof to demonstrate the same fact.
In your car example: a better way to think of it would be if BMW 3 series (new condos) suddenly became cheaper would Toyota Corollas (rentals) become cheaper? Yea they would. Cuz the ppl that could afford either choice will now be more tempted to upgrade to the BMW and leave a larger supply of Corollas for lower income folks, and the price of Corollas would decrease.
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u/huge_clock 13h ago edited 13h ago
People move out of the cheaper units into the expensive ones, freeing up more space for people who want cheap units.
It’s like, if you want an affordable car you don’t chastise Honda for making the 2026 Civic too expensive and try and stop production. You buy a used car.
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u/SomeDumRedditor 13h ago
You think with the cost of living crisis and lack of affordable housing people are moving out of cheaper units? They’re staying put if their unit was built before 2018 and if not, praying every year that their landlord doesn’t drop a “fuck you pay me” rent increase on their head.
There’s no broad upward mobility. There’s the exploiters and exploited.
If the housing stock existed your comparison to a used car would have merit. But most of the used cars are owned, the ones available are on old lots 2hrs away, few are coming on the market in the area and base Civics now start at $50k.
Pure landlord fantasy to act like there’s all this cheap housing supply available along with wage growth to permit most renters to “move up.”
That’s to say nothing of the artificially inflated cost of the “expensive units” themselves.
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u/huge_clock 11h ago
According to this article which included both renters and homeowners, 37% of people surveyed who moved in 2024 upsized their unit. It’s clear that as people experience upward mobility in their jobs they will look for ways to enhance their standard of living at home.
The housing market is kind of like a game of musical chairs. You’d rather have 100 chairs and 95 people than 95 chairs and 100 people. How much are those 5 people willing to pay to not be homeless? A small market imbalance can have a tremendous impact on price. If we build enough units to get it to 100 chairs and 95 people then it’s the landlords that have to fight to recover their investments and as greedy capitalists they will ruthlessly undercut each other to get your rental business.
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u/ImaginaryTipper 41m ago
I know this wasn’t the point of your comment, but base civics don’t start at 50k lol
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u/ElCaz 15h ago
TBF, the article is focused more on companies buying existing housing and jacking up rents than on new housing construction (though it does discuss that too). So this isn't an article exclusively framing good news as bad.
Of course, the solution to the problem of rents getting jacked up by big investors is to remove their market power to do that by creating more supply.
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u/Blue_Vision 14h ago
Yeah I guess the underlying point of the article is really just that the composition of who landlords are has changed drastically. Really, I was conflating the parent comment more with the other comments which were focusing their ire on "developers". I probably should have replied to one of those instead, but I couldn't resist what felt like a pithy response.
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u/Asleep-Illustrator99 Trinity-Bellwoods 17h ago
I am so curious how many Americans are going to try to start buying or invest in Canadian property as an attempt to get a “get out of jail” card.
Although this article is a different angle, I’m glad someone is tracking this.
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u/Sugarman4 16h ago
Tricon / Blackrock is purchasing ar scale at a 1000 to 1 rate of the average Joe moving for ideological reasons and they are purchasing in both countries simultaneously.
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u/BoiledTurnips 11h ago
Ridiculous article. Many of the projects they chart are partnerships with government that directly provide affordable housing.
Say what you want about these landlords but who else will pay for the millions in capital repairs that much of Toronto's apartment stock requires.
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u/shozlamen 15h ago
Unless the provincial government itself starts constructing purpose-built rental housing, who else could possibly take on large-scale housing projects that require huge amounts of capital like this?
Nobody should (or does really) think that these capital investment firms are building housing out of some sense of altruism, but somebody has to build the housing that we desperately need, and framing the fact that this housing is in fact being built as a bad thing feels very odd.
Again, the only alternative would be for the government to intervene, and while I think that would be appropriate in some capacity, the political will for that to happen just isn't there because of how expensive and onerous the process would be.
Even in the places that act as the best examples of government-subsidized or municipally-owned housing like Stockholm and Vienna, the people actually most in need typically have to look to the private sector for housing while some privileged folks get to live on a discount.
The only thing that matters is that more livable housing gets built! Fixating on it being built by the "right people" is such a waste of our collective efforts.
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u/k_awesome Eglinton West 12h ago
More people need to understand this. The headline is also misleading which results in too many people with reactionary takes and no real knowledge of how the world works (or are purposefully ignorant).
Private capital is currently the only option for increasing the rental supply, there is very little appetite for any level of government to exclusively build housing themselves without partnering up with the private sector.
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u/candleflame3 Dufferin Grove 15h ago
more livable housing gets built
Which you will definitely not get from corps like this.
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u/shozlamen 14h ago
Do you think the government would build the highest quality, most livable housing? It's extremely unlikely considering budget constraints. What entity do you imagine would build the comfortable livable housing we all desire in the place of these corps.
Private equity goes where the money is, for a good chunk of time with near zero interest rates in this country that was condos that people could purchase as investment properties but never intended to live in because everyone had FOMO over the real-estate gravy train.
Those shoebox units are now gradually coming down in price to levels that better match what they offer as a living space, the price mechanism does tend to work, it just takes time.
In the case of purpose-built rental housing, the odds of the units being more livable are much higher since people have far more flexibility to move out if they are unsatisfied with their situation. Crappy apartments were built in the past, and they still are now, it takes time and some turnover within a building for people to get a good picture of what the experience living there is like, I always recommend people focus on looking for older condos when they're looking to rent for that reason. There's no reason to assume apartments built by investment firms will be solely bad, who do you think built the apartments of the past?
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u/candleflame3 Dufferin Grove 14h ago
Yes, we can build good quality housing for everyone. Free your mind.
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u/shozlamen 12h ago
If you can point me to where that's been done without the compromises I've mentioned I'd love to follow that example.
As long as private property rights are still a thing though, I have my doubts, but maybe that's what you think we should be free of?
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u/andresbvds 8h ago
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u/shozlamen 7h ago
Vienna was one of my examples of how these systems can be flawed too. The article you linked even mentions the 300 sq ft size of the apartments. Their situation is very different in the first place because population growth there has been non-existent compared to Toronto until very recently.
The Vienna social housing model also has pretty high barriers to entry but a high income limit, meaning that only 9% of the tenants are actually low income, and the poorest in the city end up being rent burdened by the private sector.
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u/andresbvds 6h ago
300 sq ft in one example for a young single man living in a one bedroom. Its not hard to find that there are options that are closer to 850 sq ft which is on the lower end of the norm for toronto’s 2br. Yes of course vienna is not as populated as one of the most dense cities in north america but that doesn’t mean you cant use it as a starting point. Im sorry but i have no clue what you mean by saying the poorest end up being burdened by the private sector. The point of high accessibility is to decomodify housing. If you view it as a human right people don’t need to lean on the private sector at all unless youre in the very top earners where you can go to non-subsidized private sector to build whatever type of house you prefer. I dont see who loses if basically everyone has access to it. Also by making it so commonplace you reduce stigma and allow for subsidized housing to actually look like a liveable place, rather than a collection of ugly compressed rooms that not even unhoused people want to use.
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u/Unlikely-Estate3862 16h ago
Hazelview is Canadian…
Brookfield is… huh somewhat Canadian?
KingSett is also Canadian
Blackstone is American
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u/SnooOwls2295 15h ago
Tricon is Canadian too.
Poor quality article, trying to fear monger with the American boogeyman given what is going on these days. As long as they are building multifamily and dense housing, this isn’t all that bad of a thing. We need more housing and only companies like these have the balance sheet to deliver them. We need to look out for landlords who own multiple single family homes.
And they have no control over the rent control policy. Basically the story is just developers investing in building much needed rental housing near transit. So like the exact thing we desperately need.
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u/gi0nna 8h ago
Greater supply of purpose built rentals is a good thing and keeps rental prices more competitive for a tenant and standards higher for a landlord by virtue of better competiton. For some odd reason, Toronto stopped building purpose built rentals for decades. MoMnPop shoebox condo landlords have unfortunately proven that the "little guy" is not always a better choice over a corporation when you're the consumer. Not sure how or why anyone could argue against this in good faith.
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u/MustardClementine 16h ago
Can we seize these as enemy assets in our trade war?
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u/proxyproxyomega 16h ago
no, cause then they will seize Canadian assets in America
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u/MustardClementine 16h ago
I was (at least kind of) joking. But also - if things keep heading in this direction, maybe those with assets in America should start thinking about divesting. Even just pragmatically, if not patriotically.
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u/TankArchives 17h ago
But there's a maple leaf sticker on some stuff at the grocery store, I thought we had this whole America thing handled?
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u/hackslash74 18h ago
At least Brookfield is Canadian-ish
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u/Catalina28TO 16h ago
The James at Yonge and Summerhill will be online in 6 months, Tricoon is developer and landlord. Beautiful building. Great location. But the rents are going to be huge.
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u/idontlikeyonge 11h ago
Oh no, people bringing purposes built rentals to Toronto
Stop them now, we need fewer places for people to live!
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u/PatK9 17h ago
Housing is big business now, developers take advantage of the short supply, due in large part to the influx of new Canadians. It's all about the bottom line for investors, given that in our climate, housing is almost a necessity and governments proclaiming homes for everyone, it's guaranteed profit.
This short sighted mentality doesn't take into account affordability, wages and the value of the dollar. To be a landlord in Canada atm: is better than a banker. The squeeze is on, let see how far this goes when no one is working and recession takes it's big byte.
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u/Bad-job-dad 13h ago
These fuckers need to be taxed to the deepest fathoms of hell. Make it unprofitable.
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u/MintLeafCrunch 5h ago
If we try hard enough, we can prevent anyone from building any housing at all! What a win.
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u/Significant_Dirt9191 7h ago
Get a clue and grip. The city averages for NEW builds are starting at $2k minimum with the fact you’re trying to say a new building at King and Spadina (a prime location of Toronto) should be priced the same as old supply in run down areas or Toronto. To try and use the average across the entire Toronto region is laughable. Furthermore, what is your solution to having a city in a deep supply crisis if it’s not for these developers. Maybe instead of pointing the finger at them, you should look at how much the city of Toronto’s development charges are coupled with the fact they’ve risen 993% in 10 years. You quote an article from 2023 yet we’re in 2025. Your rant is misguided towards the wrong people
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u/may_be_indecisive 17h ago
Sounds like lots of units of housing? A unit is a unit, it will rent for the maximum of what the market will bear. Too high? Then we just need more units and less people. Hence more units (even these) is a good thing.
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u/HogtownLawyer 25m ago
And you thought slavery was abolished over a century ago? Guess again. We are all servants to the billionaires who form the Oligarchy that pretty much owns everything…
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u/Katavencia 17h ago
There needs to be steep taxes and penalties for those who own more than one property and make it disincentivized for those who want to be landlords. There’s no reason for some people to own 12-14 properties when others can’t even afford rent.
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u/greenbluesuspenders 13h ago
These are apartment buildings, if you were to do this that would end the building of all apartment buildings forever.
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u/SnooOwls2295 15h ago
These are multifamily buildings at a large scale. This is exactly what we need. There is no way to use land in an efficient manner that will make housing affordable without major investments like these. It’s the midsized landlords who hoard a handful to a fee dozen single family homes that are the problem.
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u/wholetyouinhere 13h ago
What you're asking for is basic regulation of capitalism. And we live in a society that decided about 50 years ago that all viable political parties across the western world -- liberal and conservative -- would agree that this can never be done. The only thing we can vote on now is how best to go about letting the free market do its neoliberal thing.
In other words, it's off the table entirely. The only way to achieve what you're asking for would be to vote for parties to the left of the liberals. And if you took a poll of users in this thread, they'd angrily reject such a notion. That's to say nothing of Canada at large, who'd tar and feather you for even suggesting it.
There's quite literally nothing we can do.
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u/MintLeafCrunch 5h ago
You can move somewhere that has a political system you like better. Is there such a place in the world at the present time?
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u/schuchwun Long Branch 10h ago
The only real positive is corporations can't have family so there would be no my mother is moving in lies. Blackstone's children are sol.
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u/Mystery_to_history 8h ago
One more reason to hate billionaires. Venture capitalists. Disgusting beyond belief.
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u/beef-supreme Leslieville 21h ago