CANADIAN MEGA-LANDLORDS DRIVING RENTS UP

And our governments support this while the corporate media ignore it...

(May 26, 2025) – This is a lightly edited story from the online magazine Better Dwelling.
(Here is the full Better Dwelling story: https://betterdwelling.com/vacant-units-algo-rents-canadian-mega-landlords-drive-rents-more-than-demand/)

Researchers from the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo conducted a deep dive into Toronto’s rental market and found that the most aggressive rental hikes came from large financial landlords. By using techniques like algorithmic pricing and systematic tenant displacement, these firms behave similarly to an oligopoly—coordinating toward a single goal: maximum rent extraction. The study warns that the rental crisis will worsen as these firms grow even larger.

While the study was done in Toronto, this problem has gone global. As housing becomes increasingly financialized, these firms are scaling up—often with the assistance of policymakers. That’s the case in Canada, and likely in many other countries where the problem is often pitched as the solution.

Researchers analyzed Toronto real estate data for 1,600 apartment buildings between 2022 and 2024, then broke it down by neighborhood and landlord type. They compared rents charged by financial landlords—REITs, private equity, and large asset managers—to those of traditional rental operators, like family-run firms and single operators (also known as mom-and-pop landlords).
(REITs, private equity firms, and asset managers are different ways for investors and large corporations to buy up housing and treat it like any other business. This is a very dangerous situation—and it’s getting worse. This kind of corporate investing in our homes was not allowed in the past, but now it is allowed, and this ‘business’ is growing rapidly, causing Canadians who just need a place to live a lot of stress and trouble.)

The study found that financial landlords charge 44% more than the average neighborhood rent—about $670/month more. That’s well above the premium charged by family chains (30%) or individual landlords (15–22%). This behavior compounds and accelerates rent inflation across entire neighborhoods.

Researchers found the same unit would be 13.8% more expensive if owned by a financial landlord vs. a single-property landlord.
“Put in terms that are easier to understand: if a unit held by a single owner (owner of one property) was listed at our dataset’s average rent—$2,187, the expected rent of the same unit would be $2,510 if it were owned by a financial firm—a $323 difference,” explain Martine August and Cloé St-Hilaire, the study’s authors.

Targeting The Most Vulnerable for Profits

The study suggests a strategic dismantling in the City of Toronto’s designated Neighborhood Improvement Areas (NIAs)—low-income, racialized districts with historically affordable housing. In these areas, financial firms charged 20% higher rents than other landlords—capturing what researchers call the “rent gap” in undervalued communities.

“While tenants face a crisis, the shareholders and senior executives in financial firms investing in rental housing gather diamonds.”

Financial landlords are deploying both classic and cutting-edge tools to squeeze out higher returns. One of the most controversial tools has been YieldStar, a software platform that sets rents algorithmically based on local conditions and projected demand. It even sometimes suggests leaving a unit vacant to create artificial scarcity and drive rents higher, according to the researchers.

This often involves renovating, displacing the tenants, and then re-renting the unit for much more—similar to the renovictions conducted by slumlords, but with more steps to make it look “professional.”

The researchers’ conclusion is crystal clear:
Financial landlords are driving higher prices and destroying affordability.
In Toronto, the study found these landlords scooped up nearly all rental suites in the past few years. As concentration grows, so does the problem.

Policymakers to the Rescue?

You might expect this trend to spark action—and you’d be right.
That’s why policymakers have adopted plans to throttle the growth of these firms and redirect capital toward more productive uses to fuel the country’s economic growth.
Just kidding.
Rather than reining in these firms, policymakers are using public resources to fuel their growth—even providing funds for well-capitalized firms.

In fact, the financialization of rentals is the very “solution” that policymakers are now pitching to restore housing affordability.

Here is the full report from the University of Waterloo:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308518X251328129

From The Report:

1. In Canada, financialization has become a major trend in the rental housing landscape. In all kinds of rental housing—apartments, seniors housing, student housing—financial firms (i.e. firms that make housing open to investors...) have rapidly consolidated direct ownership of housing stock. Alongside financialization, Canada’s long-running housing affordability crisis has worsened in recent years, with house prices and rents diverging from people’s incomes.

In 93% of Canadian neighborhoods, a minimum-wage worker cannot afford an average one-bedroom apartment, with unaffordability disproportionately affecting racialized renters.
In the City of Toronto, asking rents hit a record $3,000 in April 2023 after six straight quarters of double-digit increases—such that a Toronto household would need to make $100,000 per year to afford the average apartment (StatsCan, 2021).

2. Globally, researchers are exposing financial firms for buying up affordable housing, evicting at high rates, and driving up rental costs. In 2019, United Nations representatives challenged Blackstone—the world’s largest private equity group—for violating the human right to housing.

3. First, we found that financial firms in Toronto charged the highest ‘rent premiums’ to average rents—asking 44% more per month (or CAD $670 more) than average neighborhood rents (over 2022–2024), a much higher premium than other landlord types.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308518X251328129#fn1-0308518X251328129