With Toronto’s average price for a one-bedroom apartment now surpassing $2,400, sketchy landlords throughout the city continue to capitalize on tight-budget tenants by offering affordable accommodations that almost always skimp out on privacy and cleanliness.
Take a quick scroll through rental platforms like Facebook Marketplace and Kijiji and you’ll find a plethora of questionable listings, including laundry rooms advertised as living spaces, bedrooms packed with bunk beds and even landlords offering up a space in their own beds.
The latest head-scratching listing to make rounds on social media this week is a shared room for rent in Toronto’s Thorncliffe Park neighbourhood for $550 per month.
While it might not seem like a bad deal at first glance, the listing’s appealing price point is quickly overshadowed by the fact that tenants will be required to share a living room with limited privacy with at least two other people.
As shown in the listing’s photo, the space available is separated by a curtain in the living room, and is filled up with three different beds at a close distance to one another.
$550*3 = $1650 off of the living room alone!
byu/mybluntside inSlumlordsCanada
The landlord — who doesn’t seem to acknowledge the fact that tenants will have to deal with little to no privacy — highlights the space’s cleanliness and proximity to TTC bus stops instead.
The Kijiji listing was quickly reshared on Reddit, where many shared their horror and disgust with the space. “How is this sh*t legal now? Just rent a living room as an apartment for five people? What?” one person wrote under the thread.
“That’s getting ridiculous!! There needs to be a rule on how many people can be in an apartment,” another person said, while others noted that enforcing these regulations could prove to be quite difficult.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the only GTA-based listing that’s gone viral for its total invasion of privacy in recent months.
Other horror rentals include a Scarborough bedroom packed with bunk beds for $2,000 per month, a bed located in the middle of a kitchen in Scarborough for $500 a month, as well as a Toronto landlord attempting to rent out a one-bedroom apartment to six tenants for $480 a month each.