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Landlords are offering free months of rent, complimentary Wi-Fi and Presto cards to attract new tenants

May 23, 2025

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By Manuela VegaHousing Reporter

Toronto Star

Updated 
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Rental incentives are popular again as a record number of new apartments come online and prices drop.

Surinder Pal Singh

A luxury building in Midtown is offering up to two months of free rent and years of complimentary Wi-Fi. A property management company downtown is dangling three months free rent on a two-year lease. An Annex apartment operator is giving one month of free rent plus six months of free parking or a $500 move-in bonus.

These are some of dozens of incentives seen recently for rental apartments across the Toronto area.

Move-in perks haven’t been this popular since the onset of the pandemic, when renters were leaving the city and rental operators were responding to an unprecedented situation, said Michael Niezgoda, Urbanation’s senior manager of market research and development.

This time around, they’re responding to increased competition amid a “multidecade record of new housing supply entering the market all at once,” Niezgoda said.

Experts say apartment operators for buildings old and new are offering the deals to attract new tenants as they compete with thousands of vacant units built in recent years. While condo landlords have dropped prices to attract renters, apartment corporations have resisted dropping prices across the board and instead have looked for other ways to sweeten the deal. But as experts anticipate new supply to dwindle in the coming years, they say these deals are unlikely to last for certain units.

By the end of 2024, as thousands of new condo and rental apartments were completed, vacancy rates in purpose-built rental apartments built after 2000 in the GTHA were at the highest level since 2021.

At the same time, in the last quarter of 2024, about 50 per cent of 180 GTHA apartment buildings tracked by Urbanation offered rental incentives, compared to only 15 per cent during the same time in 2023, Niezgoda said.

With so many new units to fill, rental corporations are trying to stand out without dropping rent prices too much — even as condo prices in the GTHA reached a seven-quarter low, he added.

Urbanation data shows that on a price-per-square-foot basis, rental apartments are 4.7 per cent more expensive than condos, but because rental apartments tend to be bigger, the average price difference is close to 20 per cent.

Before the influx of rental stock, when there was less competition, apartment operators would offer one month of free rent, Niezgoda said, but it’s become more common that they offer two months or more, along with cash bonuses and other perks.

“We’ve seen projects offer one year of free storage locker or parking spots,” he said. “Others offer pre-loaded Presto cards or gym or car share memberships for a year.”

Reuben Labovitz, broker and sales director at Fox Marin Associates, said the way “free months” of rent are applied can vary; the second and 11th month can be free, while the renter still pays first and last, or the deal could be evenly split over 12 months as a discount on rent.

However, when the time comes for a rent increase, the increase will be on the base rent, not the discounted price, he warned.

For example, if rent is $2,500 per month but $2,100 with the discount, a rent-controlled building could add the maximum legal rent increase to the $2,500 price, rather than $2,100. That means that with this year’s guideline increase of 2.5 per cent, next year they would pay $2,562.50.

Non-rent-controlled buildings tend to increase rent about 7 per cent per year, Labovitz said, so the same principle could apply.

“Be aware that this might seem like a really good deal in year one, but going forward, there is a high possibility of a much larger rental increase down the line, and then you might be in a position where you need to find another place in a year if you can’t afford that,” he said.

While the practice is most common in purpose-built rental apartments, leasing agent Justin Bailey said some condo landlords — especially those in new buildings where dozens of units are available for lease — use these strategies too.

Bailey has seen landlords offer a 50 per cent discount on the second month of the lease or one month of free rent.

“We try to get creative without actually impacting the listing price,” he said.

While Urbanation projects completions will continue to be strong in 2025, Niezgoda said condo completions are expected to drop by mid-2026.

As a result, older, more established apartment buildings will stop offering these incentives, but new buildings with more vacancies may continue to provide them, he said.

Urbanation projects about 30,800 condo units will be built in 2025, and about 40 per cent of those will be available for lease. That growth is expected to slow until there are fewer than 10,000 condo completions in 2028.

Manuela Vega

Manuela Vega is a Toronto-based housing reporter for the Star. Follow her on X: @_manuelavega.