Has Toronto Built Enough Purpose-Built Rentals?
PropertyMesh analysed 3,611 registered Toronto rental apartment buildings to show when the city’s dedicated rental housing was built, how sharply construction fell after the 1970s, and why the age of the existing stock matters.
Toronto has a substantial rental housing inventory, but its size alone does not tell the full story. The more revealing question is when that inventory was created.
PropertyMesh’s analysis of the City of Toronto’s registered apartment-building data found that approximately two-thirds of recorded units with a known construction year were built during the 1960s and 1970s. More than 80% were built before 1980. New rental construction has returned in recent years, but the volume remains small beside the postwar apartment boom.
This matters because Toronto’s rental market now depends heavily on housing created several decades ago. It also helps explain why rented condominium units have become such an important part of the city’s rental supply. The City’s Housing Data Book reported 557,970 occupied rental homes in Toronto in 2021, with approximately 46% identified as purpose-built rentals and the remainder falling within the broader secondary market.[2]
What is a purpose-built rental?
A purpose-built rental is a building constructed and operated primarily to provide long-term rental housing. The building is generally owned by one landlord, company, public housing provider or non-profit organization. Tenants rent individual apartments, but the units are not separately owned in the way condominium units are.
In a purpose-built rental building, one owner or housing provider typically controls the building and manages its rental units. In a condominium, each unit may have a different owner, and some owners may choose to rent their units while others occupy them.
For RentSafeTO purposes, the City defines an apartment building as a purpose-built rental building with at least three storeys and 10 rental units, subject to specific exclusions. Condominiums, housing co-operatives, licensed retirement homes and long-term care homes are not included in the program.[1]
Purpose-built does not mean affordable. A building may charge market rents, contain affordable units, operate as social housing, or combine more than one rental category. It also does not mean that apartments are currently available. A building can be fully occupied and still form part of the purpose-built rental inventory.
How PropertyMesh conducted the analysis
PropertyMesh examined 3,611 records in Toronto’s RentSafeTO Apartment Building Registration data. The analysis used the recorded year built and the confirmed number of units for each registered property. Buildings were grouped into construction periods, and unit totals were calculated for each period.
The dataset contained 328,273 confirmed units. Of these, 327,816 had a recorded construction year. Seventeen buildings containing 457 units did not have a year recorded and were excluded from calculations based on construction age.
| Recorded property type | Buildings | Units | Share of units |
|---|---|---|---|
| Private | 3,039 | 260,335 | 79.3% |
| Toronto Community Housing | 328 | 47,841 | 14.6% |
| Other social housing | 241 | 20,097 | 6.1% |
This property-type breakdown is important. The RentSafeTO inventory includes private buildings, Toronto Community Housing properties and other social housing. It should not be compared directly with a private-market purpose-built rental estimate without adjusting for differences in definitions and reference years.
What this dataset does not show: It does not provide the number of apartments currently vacant or advertised for rent. It also does not capture every smaller rental property because RentSafeTO generally applies only to buildings with three or more storeys and at least 10 units. The results should therefore be described as an analysis of Toronto’s registered large-rental apartment inventory, not a complete census of every rental home.
When Toronto built its rental housing
The main chart groups the registered inventory by construction period. Switch between unit counts and building counts to see why measuring units provides the clearer picture.
The 1960s stand apart. The RentSafeTO data contains 127,988 units built during that decade, equal to 39% of all units with a known construction year. The 1970s added another 90,051 recorded units, or 27.5%.
Construction then dropped sharply. The registered inventory contains 20,247 units built during the 1980s and 12,490 during the 1990s. The 2000s represent the weakest full decade in this building-level dataset, with only 5,269 recorded units.
There is evidence of a recovery. The 2010s account for 13,739 units, while buildings dated from 2020 through 2026 contain 12,634. Those newer totals are meaningful, but they remain modest when compared with the volume produced during Toronto’s two dominant construction decades.
Counting buildings alone can obscure this pattern. Toronto has more than 1,000 registered buildings dating from 1940 to 1959, but many are smaller than the large apartment towers constructed during the 1960s. Unit counts therefore provide a better measure of how much rental capacity each period contributed.
Two decades built two-thirds of the rental city
The same finding becomes easier to understand when the inventory is represented as 100 apartment-building icons.
Out of every 100 recorded units with a known construction year, approximately 39 were built during the 1960s and another 27 or 28 during the 1970s. Only about 33 or 34 were built across every other period combined.
This concentration is the defining feature of Toronto’s rental inventory. The city did not build at a steady pace over many generations. It experienced a major postwar rental-building boom, followed by a long period in which dedicated rental construction was greatly reduced.
One decade outbuilt the next forty-four years
The City’s separate historical growth series shows the scale of the construction collapse even more clearly.
The City reports growth of 117,109 purpose-built rental units during the 1960s and 67,175 during the 1970s. Growth fell to 5,117 units in the 1980s, only 320 in the 1990s and 3,402 in the 2000s. It increased to 11,158 in the 2010s and 6,505 from 2020 through 2023.[3]
The most recent period covers only four years, so it should not be read as a full-decade comparison. Even after adjusting for that difference, however, the annual pace remains far below the rate achieved in the 1960s.
Why Toronto’s rental construction changed
No single policy or market force explains the full decline. The history reflects a combination of public financing, tax treatment, development economics and the rise of the condominium model.
The Limited Dividend Program supports rental construction
The federal program provided long-term loans at reduced interest rates and high loan-to-value ratios. The City reports that it supported more than 100,000 rental homes nationally, including 20,000 in Metro Toronto.
Toronto adds 117,109 rental homes
A combination of strong demand, public policy and access to financing supports the largest decade of purpose-built rental growth in the City’s historical series.
The MURB program encourages private investment
The Multiple Unit Residential Building program allowed investors to deduct rental-building depreciation against other income, making rental development more attractive.
Support programs recede and construction falls
The City links the elimination of major rental-development programs during the 1980s and early 1990s to a drastic reduction in new rental supply.
Only 320 units are added
Dedicated rental construction nearly disappears from the City’s historical growth series.
Rental condos fill a growing share of the gap
Purpose-built rental remains a small part of new supply while investor-owned condominium units become increasingly important to Toronto renters.
Rental construction begins to return
New financing programs and renewed institutional interest help improve activity, although construction remains well below the postwar peak.
6,505 units are added in four years
The shorter period shows continued growth, but it does not yet demonstrate a return to the scale of the 1960s or 1970s.
Governments try to improve project viability
Toronto’s rental incentives, federal low-cost lending and other measures are intended to help projects move from approval into construction.
The Limited Dividend Program and MURB were not the only factors behind Toronto’s rental boom, but they illustrate how government policy helped shape development economics. The City states that the elimination of programs designed to facilitate rental construction, particularly at the federal level, had a major effect on new supply.[3]
The private development model also matters. A condominium project can collect deposits and use pre-sales to demonstrate demand before construction, while a purpose-built rental owner generally carries the project through construction and lease-up before achieving stabilized rental income. This creates a different risk and financing profile.
CMHC research has also identified financial feasibility challenges for new private rental projects. In the six Canadian markets studied, significant barriers included land costs, government charges, underground parking costs and market rents that were often insufficient to support total development costs. For Toronto specifically, the research found that removing land cost from the analysis substantially improved project performance.[4]
These findings do not mean that rental construction is impossible. They help explain why purpose-built projects may depend on lower-cost land, patient institutional capital, public land, tax relief, low-cost financing or other incentives to become viable.
What does an aging rental inventory mean for Toronto renters?
An older building is not automatically a poor building. Many of Toronto’s postwar apartment towers continue to provide long-term rental housing in established neighbourhoods, often near transit, parks, schools and shopping. The data also does not measure building condition, unit quality or tenant satisfaction.
The age profile does mean that maintenance, capital repairs and building renewal are central to Toronto’s housing strategy. When most of a city’s rental capacity is concentrated in older structures, protecting the existing stock can be as important as adding new units. Elevators, plumbing, electrical systems, windows, heating, cooling and building envelopes require ongoing investment over a property’s life.
New purpose-built rentals add choice and can provide professional leasing, modern building systems and a consistent management structure. They are not necessarily lower-cost. New construction must support current land, financing and construction expenses, so asking rents can be higher than rents in older occupied buildings.
Rented condominium units serve a different role. They can expand rental choice in newer buildings and neighbourhoods where dedicated rental supply is limited, but each unit may have a different landlord and may return to owner occupancy or be sold. The City’s Housing Data Book reported that rental condominium inventory increased by 19%, or 19,130 units, between 2018 and 2022, compared with 4%, or 11,640 units, for purpose-built rentals.[2]
Renters comparing dedicated rental buildings with privately owned units should evaluate more than the monthly asking rent. Building management, included utilities, rent-increase rules, maintenance processes, unit condition and the security of the rental arrangement can all affect the experience. PropertyMesh’s real estate agent for rentals provides assistance with rental searches and leasing documentation across multiple property types.
Is Toronto finally building more purpose-built rentals?
The recent direction is more encouraging than the 1990s or 2000s, but proposed, approved, financed, under-construction and completed units are not interchangeable. A project in the development pipeline does not become usable rental housing until construction is finished and the building is ready for occupancy.
Toronto launched the first phase of its Purpose-Built Rental Housing Incentives stream in late 2024. By June 2026, City reporting indicated that 16 projects were advancing, with more than 2,700 homes under construction and the remaining approximately 5,200 approved homes expected to start construction by the end of 2026. City Council also directed staff in June 2026 to prepare Phase 2, intended to identify up to 10,000 additional rental homes for City support, including at least 2,000 affordable homes.[5] [6]
Federal low-cost lending is another part of the recovery. CMHC’s Apartment Construction Loan Program provides financing for eligible rental projects during construction through stabilized operations.[7] These programs may help move projects forward, but approvals and financial commitments should not be reported as completed housing.
The next stage of PropertyMesh’s analysis will therefore examine Toronto’s rental development pipeline by status. The key measures will be units completed, under construction, approved and proposed. That will allow a more direct answer to the larger question: is the current recovery large enough to alter the long-term construction pattern shown in this article?
Toronto has a large rental inventory, but most of it came from a short period of extraordinary construction.
PropertyMesh’s building-level analysis found that 66.5% of recorded units with a known construction year were built in the 1960s and 1970s, while 80.4% were built before 1980. The City’s historical series shows that the 1960s alone added more purpose-built rental homes than the entire period from 1980 through 2023. Recent construction is a meaningful improvement, but Toronto has not yet recreated the scale of its postwar rental-building boom.
Frequently asked questions
Does 328,273 units mean that many apartments are currently available?
No. The number represents confirmed units within the registered buildings analysed. It is an inventory measure, not a live vacancy or rental-listings count.
Does RentSafeTO include every purpose-built rental building in Toronto?
No. The program generally applies to rental apartment buildings with at least three storeys and 10 units. Smaller properties may not appear, and certain housing types are excluded.
Are purpose-built rentals always affordable?
No. Purpose-built describes the intended rental tenure of a building, not its rent level. A building may contain market-rent, affordable, social or mixed-income units.
Why are there more registered units than the private purpose-built estimate in older City reports?
The datasets use different definitions and reference periods. The RentSafeTO data analysed here includes private buildings, Toronto Community Housing and other social housing, while some market reports separate private primary-market rentals from social and affordable housing.
Is Toronto building more rental housing now?
Construction has recovered from the very low levels recorded in the 1990s and 2000s. The scale of completed supply should still be separated from proposed or approved projects. A pipeline analysis is required to measure how much housing is actually being delivered.
Sources and methodology references
- City of Toronto, RentSafeTO Registration and Renewal, and the City’s definition of an apartment building.
- City of Toronto, Housing Secretariat Data Book, March 2023.
- City of Toronto, Build More Homes: Expanding Incentives for Purpose-Built Rental Housing, October 2024.
- Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Purpose-Built Rentals Facing Financial Feasibility Challenges.
- City of Toronto, Rental Housing Supply Program, current program information.
- City of Toronto, Council decision on Phase 2 of the Purpose-Built Rental Homes Incentives stream, June 2026.
- Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Apartment Construction Loan Program.