The average one-bedroom posting on Rentals.ca was $1,763 in May, up from $1,269 in May, 2019.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
Read through Facebook ads for rental homes in Montreal, and you’ll likely see the same kind of angst in many Canadian cities right now. Commenters regularly complain about landlords posting apartments at high rates. Angry and laughing face emojis abound, reacting in disbelief to postings.
There’s no doubt that rent is on a major upswing in Montreal, the country’s second-largest city. The average one-bedroom posting on Rentals.ca was $1,763 in May, up from $1,269 in May, 2019. That’s nearly a 40-per-cent increase. But there’s one big difference: The prices are much lower than in any other major city.
In Vancouver and Toronto, renters are numb to listings of $2,500 or even $3,000 for a one-bedroom apartment. Even small cities such as Kingston, Halifax and Brantford, Ont., have higher average rental rates than Montreal, where a one-bedroom listed for $1,800 in a trendy neighbourhood can make people upset.
There are a handful of factors that have historically made Montreal so much cheaper than the rest of Canada. The city’s bylaws make it easy for the housing stock to grow; French-language requirements limit the population inflow and the demand for housing; the provincial landlord-tenant board has been steadfast in protecting tenants’ rights.
In Montreal, multiplexes – the basis for sheer housing stock – are a standard aspect of life.
“Montreal was one of the first cities in Canada to be developed, and at that time means of transport was quite limited, so they had to build dense structures,” said Francis Cortellino, a Montreal-based real estate economist with the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. (CMHC).
The result is a kind of density that doesn’t exist in other cities. Rows of attached duplexes and triplexes – with the classic Montreal feature of rickety wrought-iron staircases leading to upper units – are present not only in the city centre, but also in suburban neighbourhoods.
The city has also long had more relaxed zoning laws that make it easier to build multiple units on one lot, Mr. Cortellino said. “The speed at which supply can arrive to the market was lower in Toronto and Vancouver than Montreal.”
Studies by the CMHC have found that supply elasticity – the ability for a municipality to add housing when demand is high – in Montreal is particularly strong, while approval delays are among the lowest in major cities.
Montreal also has a wealth of purpose-built rental housing, with almost double the amount of purpose-built rental units compared to Toronto, and nearly six times more than Vancouver.
Toronto just began allowing four-unit multiplexes on a single lot by default this year; the B.C. government introduced province-wide legislation in 2023 to allow between three- to six-unit multiplexes by default. Even after the rules were passed, they’re controversial and attract opposition from people who don’t want to see the face of their neighbourhood change.
French is another layer that adds to the sluggish housing demand. The language requirements and relatively low wages have acted as a soft cap on housing demand, and it is part of the reason why interprovincial and international immigration is low. In fact, the 1960s and 70s – when Quebec solidified French language laws leading to the departure of many corporations and hundreds of thousands of Montreal residents – was also a period in which the city’s real estate market stagnated.
In historical data provided by the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA), Montreal had some of the most valuable land in 1960, with the average price for all property types being $22,616. That compared with $16,329 in Toronto, $13,950 in Calgary and $13,106 in Vancouver.
By 1969, all of those cities had overtaken Montreal’s average property values, which had remained stagnant at $23,702. Toronto, meanwhile, had risen to $29,931. By 1979, the gap had grown much larger: Housing prices in almost every major city in Canada were higher than in Montreal, with an average price of $51,644, while Toronto’s was $73,992 – Regina was one of the only urban centres with cheaper property prices.
“Real estate values dropped significantly at the time and stayed low, all of a sudden we saw overnight a change in value of real estate between Toronto and Montreal, and this remains this way,” said Avi Friedman, director of McGill University’s Affordable Homes Program in the School of Architecture.
But Montreal housing isn’t cheap just because of language barriers and the weaker economy after the 70s and 80s. After all, the average income in 2021 was $53,600 in Montreal compared with $59,250 in Toronto, according to Statistics Canada.
Tenants also have an extremely powerful ally in Quebec: the provincial landlord-tenant board.
Unlike most provinces, the Tribunal administratif du logement has a reputation for being staunchly on the side of renters. Not only do Quebec renters have great rights, but landlords also tend to believe that the board will enforce them.
For example, landlords don’t necessarily have free reign to increase rent when signing a new tenant. Renters who sign a new lease can dispute their rent charge if they find it to be an exorbitant increase from a previous renter, and landlords will often negotiate with a tenant rather than letting the landlord-tenant board make a strong-handed decision.
It’s one reason that speculation hasn’t driven housing prices up in a wild manner as has happened in Vancouver and Toronto.
But Cédric Dussault, a housing-rights activist with Quebec’s housing committees and tenants associations, said the major issue is that the onus is on renters to fight for their rights to rent controls.
That means a new tenant has to be able to prove the previous rent charge if they want to dispute a new rental contract. Plus, renters have to start out their landlord-tenant relationship with a dispute, which isn’t the most desirable move for a long-term renter.
For Quebec to remain a cheap, renter-friendly province, Mr. Dussault said the government needs to implement a rental registry, which would allow renters to formally see what previous rents were at a given property and to push landlords to only raise rents by reasonable amounts.
“Unless we have proper rent control and better protection against evictions, this situation will continue to happen,” Mr. Dussault said.
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