Canadian landlord wants you to share a bed with a stranger for $550 a month rent
With Toronto area rent prices back to unconscionable highs after a short-lived stint of lockdown lows, the region has been seeing its fair share of horror apartment listings that offer pretty bleak living conditions to desperate renters looking to secure a spot in a competitive and overpriced market.
One new listing may just take the cake, though, not for how dingy the unit is or its ridiculous price, but for the fact that the landlord is asking separate tenants to share not just a room, but a bed with each other.
“One spacious room available for rent to share with our one existing well-behaved and clean working professional tenant from India. Beautiful family-friendly home. Very safe and quite [sic] neighborhood,” reads the recent Kijiji ad for a room for rent, which isn’t even in downtown Toronto, but 45 minutes from it, in Ajax.
The photos show a clean, decently outfitted second-floor bedroom (with closet) in a nice suburban home complete with a large backyard, swimming pool, sauna, and basement rec room, all of which the renter could share with a family and their three dogs — based on prior approval and “landlord discretion” — as well as two other tenants.
But, the major catch of the $550 per month room in someone else’s home is that prospective inhabitants will have to share the bedroom, and the bed in it, with an existing boarder.
“Ideal for any working professional or student. Room currently has one king bed to share,” the listing details, adding that the location at Westney and Kingston Road is a “high-demand community” with close access to transit and Highway 401 (though having a car to drive there will cost you another $100 a month in parking at the home).
Yes, it may be one of the few places you can find in the GTA for around $500 a month, and yes, you can relive your small-town Ontario teenaged years playing snooker in someone’s rich parents’ basement and swimming in their pool, but at what cost?
With even less space of your own than some of the other undesirable units with zero privacy that we’ve seen, and located in Ajax, no less, this family may likely have a hard time finding another tenant to help pay off their mortgage.
Then again, in this rental market and with inflationary pressures and the current cost of living, who knows?