Someone in Toronto is renting a DIY bedroom in their tiny condo living room for $1,400 a month
The price to rent a bedroom in a shared apartment in Toronto has reached a figure that some of us will remember paying for an entire place of our own in the not-so-distant past, and the market only seems to be getting worse for tenants as the cost-of-living crisis drags on.
Landlords dealing with sky-high mortgage rates and tenants dealing with the inflated price of just about everything are becoming equally desperate, and some of the units hitting the market — and getting occupied for ludicrous prices — offer quite dismal conditions with zero privacy.
While it may not be as bad as sharing a bedroom or an actual bed with a stranger, one new listing and its makeshift DIY bedroom-in-a-living-room shows how bad the landscape is for renters now.
The rental, shared by a local realtor on TikTok, shows a modern condo similar to many in the city but with even less space than one might anticipate at first glance.
“Just when we thought the Toronto rental market couldn’t get any crazier, you need to see this,” he says as the camera pans through the apartment, which is only meant to be a small two-bedroom unit.
@a1_realestate Are we surprised on how landlords in Toronto are handling rentals?#torontorentals #torontorealestate #torontorealestatemarket #torontocondos #greenscreenvideo ♬ Say So (Instrumental Version) [Originally Performed by Doja Cat] – Elliot Van Coup
“I came across this room rental the other day where they basically just put up some walls in the living room of a two-bedroom condo,” the agent explains, showing the hallway in the extremely narrow unit, where a new wall has blocked off the already-tiny living room to make it into a private space.
Inside the room, a single bed abuts a storage unit that is being used as a wall to divide the sleeping quarters from the communal kitchen, now made substantially smaller as a result.
A desk in the corner faces out to what was once the living room windows, meaning that the sole communal space for the three renters would now be the uncomfortably cramped kitchen, bathroom, hallway and balcony.
The poster calls the listing “one of the craziest” he’s seen in a while, going on to reveal the real kicker, which is the rental price of the converted space: a whopping $1,400 per month plus utilities.
Unfortunately, we can only expect more ads like this as homeowners renew their mortgages at steeper rates that may only get higher still, along with the cost of so many other goods and services.
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