For two months, Carranza and her husband slept on a couch in a small, one-bathroom apartment in downtown Toronto that they shared with two other couples as they searched for a home.
The real estate agents Carranza was working with said the reason they were rejected was because they were newcomers with no credit scores, no reference letters and — at the time — no jobs. So the agents suggested they offer up to a year of rent up front.
Desperate, Carranza started looking for options on Kijiji. There, she found a one-bedroom-one-den apartment near Kipling Station for $2,250. The landlords were willing to meet with Carranza and her husband in person.
They ended up handing over $28,300 — their life savings — to prove their reliability to the landlords and, finally, secure a home. (CBC News has seen emails that confirm the transaction.)
I mean… No jobs? I wouldn’t want to rent to someone who had no job either. That’s an insane risk. Even as a Canadian citizen who was born here I would not expect someone to rent to me if I had no job.
and even with a job good luck.
one of my clients is homeless and works full time. no one will rent to him because at best he can afford 3 months rent up front. He can’t afford anything else because he needs to eat (can’t grocery shop cause he doesn’t have a fridge or anywhere to store food) and needs to constantly pay to shower, clean his clothes/buy new clothes, and pay to store his belongings while he’s at work.
So landlords are going to favor someone WITHOUT a job but can pay 12 months upfront as opposed to a homeless guy WITH a job that can only pay 3.
It’s been suggested to him to leave Toronto but his fear is it took him so long to find a job in the first place he’s afraid that leaving the city and his job will result in him having to start over once again and just take him longer to once again get back on his feet.
When you are moving with a PR from Express Entry that’s basically what happens. You get accepted for being skilled labor and after getting into the Country you can get a job, not the other way around. That’s why you have to show proof you can sustain yourself for a year unemployed.
No job, no credit, no references, and a backed up landlord-tenant board, meaning that the landlord can’t evict for at least a year if they don’t pay the rent… no surprise that they had to put cash up front.
The bigger issue, though, is why stay in downtown Toronto? It’s the second most expensive real estate market in Canada and an extremely competitive job market. There are a hundreds other less expensive places of live that would greatly value an influx of people with skills. Where I live (not Toronto), half of our IT department are newcomers from India and Africa who were smart enough to realize that there is more to Canada than Toronto.
Yet another case where under-funding the LTB is bad for both landlords and tenants, and yet, the backlog continues…
