TORONTO — On the hunt for a rental home in Calgary over the last six weeks, Marissa Giesinger and her boyfriend trawled through listings morning, noon and night, only to find most come along with dozens of applications and a steep price tag. As an added difficulty, many landlords are unwelcoming to the couple's brood — dogs Kado and Rosco and a cat named Jester.
"What this does is create such a burden on this rental housing market that even though we're out of the summer rental season, there's so much demand that going to continue like this until the fall and into the winter," he said. Rentals.ca data show newly listed one-bedroom properties in Calgary priced at an average $1,728 per month in August, up 21.6 per cent from a year earlier. Two-bedroom homes have climbed 17.4 per cent to $2,150 over the same period.
It's numbers like these that have convinced Kanishka Punjabi to abandon her hopes of moving in the near term.The public relations worker has been living in Mississauga, Ont., but felt it was time to find a home in downtown or midtown Toronto, closer to where she works.