Where to live in the City of Toronto if you want to live close to the downtown core and pay cheap rent…
Toronto’s amalgamation in 1998 turned it into the fifth-largest city in North America and gave us the six neighbourhoods we know today: Etobicoke, York, North York, Scarborough, York and Old Toronto. Though these neighbourhoods share a city hall, rental prices vary greatly in these expensive cities. But where will you pay cheap rent prices in Toronto?
A report by Roomvu Marketing, a Canadian real-estate analytics company based in Vancouver, in collaboration with the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business, looked at the average rental price of one and two-bedroom apartments, as well as bachelor suites, across six neighbourhoods. What they wanted to reveal is which areas had cheap rent prices in the City of Toronto.
Want to know what you are paying in rent in comparison to other neighbourhoods in the City of Toronto? Check out our interactive map below.
*For optimal viewing, open the interactive map on a tablet or desktop.
Figure 1: Two-Bedroom Average Rent Prices
The average monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Old Toronto costs a whopping 41 per cent higher than in Scarborough ($3,274 versus $2,323). But even without using Scarborough as a point of comparison, you can see that a two-bedroom in Old Toronto will cost you significantly more than anywhere else in the Six (about 27 per cent on average).
Figure 2: One-Bedroom Average Rent Prices
The variance in price becomes less dramatic when comparing the cost of one-bedroom apartments across the city. Though Old Toronto remains the most expensive place to live, the difference between it and the cheapest neighbourhood is only 21 per cent. What’s more, there is only a 9.5 per cent price difference between the second most expensive neighbourhood (North York) and the least expensive (Scarborough).
Figure 3: Bachelor Suites Average Rent Prices
Just when you thought you were going to pack up and move to Scarborough to save some money, it turns out that the cheapest rent for a bachelor suite is not east of Victoria Park Avenue. Instead, York is the neighbourhood with the lowest average monthly rent at $1,425. It is most certainly the outlier however, as the average price among the other five neighbourhoods is around $1,735.
Figure 4: Average Rent Prices for all three types of apartments for all six neighbourhoods.
Here’s a look at the difference in prices for all three types of apartments across all six neighbourhoods.
Though there are some dramatic differences in prices across different neighbourhoods – two-bedroom apartments being chief among them – Sam Merhbod, CEO at Roomvu and a realtor in the Vancouver-area, says that variance in price across a city as big as Toronto seen in other markets as well.
“We see the same thing across Canada. The most desirable a location is, based on things like services, amenities, proximity to work, the more expensive the cost of living will be,” explains Mehrbod. “We see similar differences in prices in Vancouver, Calgary and Montreal as well.”
As the tenth least affordable city in the world, no matter where you go in the City of Toronto, you can expect housing to cost a lot. The good news is, renters can find a bit of relief in regions outside of the downtown core. The bad news, there are a lot of TTC stops between Scarborough and Downtown.
Want more real estate content? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter.