People are blasting a tone-deaf ad saying Canadian landlords can "grow rich in their sleep"
An advertisement for a Toronto property management company has hit a nerve with residents who consider it to be in poor taste amid the current housing crisis.
Those who will never be able to afford a house or condo in their home city thanks to, among other things, wealthy investors buying up housing stock are understandably taking issue with the promotion, which sits in the window of a local RE/MAX brokerage on Harbour Street.
“Our landlords grow rich in their sleep,” the poster reads in large lettering on top of an image of the downtown skyline, touting Turnkey Property Management, which is operated by RE/MAX Plus-City.
“We manage hundreds of individual condos for investors.”
A snapshot of the ad posted to Toronto Reddit on Wednesday has amassed hundreds of impassioned responses, some of which questioned if it was satire or a joke of some sort.
“Wait….this isn’t an ironic guerrilla activism poster???” reads one well-liked comment.
“Oh wow, I genuinely thought the same. What an absolutely infuriating message,” another says.
Because it was decided that a poster that read: “We’re Part of the Problem” was just a little too blunt. Re/Max window Lakeshore Blvd and Bay, Toronto.
byu/Happy8Day intoronto
Still, others wondered how whoever was behind the particular sign failed so drastically to “read the room” given the city’s housing situation.
“How this got past any vetting is beyond me. Yes, the investor class doesn’t really care about these things. But this is incredibly tone deaf,” one person wrote.
And while some pointed out that landlords are needed to, you know, lease housing to the millions who don’t own a home themselves, one commenter prudently noted that “there’s a need for rental housing and someone to manage it, but we’d all be a lot better off if that someone wasn’t parasitic middlemen who get into it so they can ‘grow rich in their sleep.'”
Though Toronto is perennially neck-and-neck with Vancouver for most expensive real estate in the country (often coming in second place) we have been deemed the most expensive Canadian city to live in generally.
The cost of the average home in the GTA is now 210% more than the typical household can handle, necessitating an annual income of at least $218,100. In the last decade, the price of a home in the region has more than doubled to reach well over $1 million. And, investors now own more than half of the city’s new condo units.
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