Landlords are offering free months of rent, complimentary Wi-Fi and Presto cards to attract new tenants

[RENT4ALLPM]

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Landlords are offering free months of rent, complimentary Wi-Fi and Presto cards to attract new tenants

A luxury building in Midtown is offering up to two months of free rent and years of complimentary Wi-Fi. A property management company downtown is dangling three months free rent on a two-year lease. An Annex apartment operator is giving one month of free rent plus six months of free parking or a $500 move-in bonus.

These are some of dozens of incentives seen recently for rental apartments across the Toronto area.

Move-in perks haven’t been this popular since the onset of the pandemic, when renters were leaving the city and rental operators were responding to an unprecedented situation, said Michael Niezgoda, Urbanation’s senior manager of market research and development.

This time around, they’re responding to increased competition amid a “multidecade record of new housing supply entering the market all at once,” Niezgoda said.

Experts say apartment operators for buildings old and new are offering the deals to attract new tenants as they compete with thousands of vacant units built in recent years. While condo landlords have dropped prices to attract renters, apartment corporations have resisted dropping prices across the board and instead have looked for other ways to sweeten the deal. But as experts anticipate new supply to dwindle in the coming years, they say these deals are unlikely to last for certain units.

By the end of 2024, as thousands of new condo and rental apartments were completed, vacancy rates in purpose-built rental apartments built after 2000 in the GTHA were at the highest level since 2021.

https://www.thestar.com/real-estate/lan ... ndlordsare

[Lee]

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