The Rental Paradox: Why Lower Prices Aren’t Enough

A conversation with Max Steinman, the CEO of RentSync and Rentals.ca

Sabrina Maddeaux

Missing Middle Initiative

Meredith Martin

, and

Cara Stern

Oct 22, 2025

Rents are finally dropping in many Canadian cities, yet finding an affordable, decent apartment still feels impossible. What’s going on with the rental market?

In this episode, Sabrina Maddeaux sits down with Max Steinman, CEO of RentSync and Rentals.ca, to unpack what’s driving the recent rent declines, how rent control policies backfired, and why “financialization” isn’t the villain it’s made out to be.

We dive into how younger Canadians are coping with record-high housing costs, what renters should know about purpose-built rentals vs. condos, and how government policies might actually be making things worse.

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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, which has been lightly edited.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Hi and welcome to The Missing Middle. I’m Sabrina Maddeaux. Today, we’re talking about Canada’s rental market and why rents are actually falling in many cities, but finding a decent place still feels impossible.

Before we get into it, don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel.

So today I’m here with Max Steinman, CEO of RentSync, which owns Rentals.ca. Max’s company connects landlords and tenants and puts out monthly rent reports that basically tell us how screwed we all are or aren’t. Max, thanks so much for being here today.

Max Steinman: Thanks for having me on.

Sabrina Maddeaux: So the big story in the rental market right now is that rents have actually been declining in a lot of Canada’s cities. Can you tell us why that’s happening?

Max Steinman: Yeah, for sure. Maybe we’re a little less screwed now. That’s a way to characterize it.

Sabrina Maddeaux: A little good news for once.

Max Steinman: If I were to characterize the current situation, rents have been falling nationally. It’s not the same in every city. We put out this rent report on a monthly basis, and the headline is always national, but you really have to drill down to each market to see what’s going on.

Generally speaking, they are falling across the country. We have seen this major shift in the last 18 months or so in supply and demand that is ultimately leading to this result. We went from this period of severe undersupply and very intense demand through COVID and up until arguably about 12 months ago. Some markets saw, during that period, 20 to 30% increases in rents in what is a very short timeline.

Now we’re in a market where demand has fallen off significantly due to a decrease in – well, there’s just more stagnancy in the market. Younger people are not moving out as much as before due to affordability. Then there’s been a storyline around, obviously, international students and international study permits dropping.

That’s all happening at the same time that a record amount of inventory of new condos, as well as new purpose-built rental, is coming to market. Those units are hitting in the last couple of quarters and the next couple of quarters. It has created this perfect storm that’s enabled rents to fall from their peak. In some markets, we’ve seen the pullback be as much as 15 to 20% from the peak, in markets like Toronto and Vancouver, which were the most expensive markets in the country.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Could you dive a bit deeper into how this rental market is different from two years ago or even pre-pandemic? Is it mostly just the story of there’s more supply and then there’s tweaks to immigration policy, or are there other factors at play?

Max Steinman: Yeah, those are ultimately the biggest drivers. I really do believe that ultimately, supply and demand are going to dictate the direction of affordability and ultimately asking rents in the market.

We’ve seen a little bit of loosening in terms of churn rates – the number of people who actually move out of rentals and look to either upgrade or move into the housing market, but we’re also still in a period where we’re seeing this incredibly low period of churn. Churn in most markets is still between 10% and 15%, when in the past, that was usually closer to 30% in what’s maybe a healthier market, where people can just move as they desire.

That’s a very weird thing. Normally, if you have a 100-unit building, 30 people should move out in a year, and that’s natural churn. We’re in a period where 10 to 15 are moving out.

That also means, to your earlier point, that there’s just less availability of inventory and choices out there at the same time, especially in older stock and more affordable apartments. That still remains a really big challenge for some people.

Sabrina Maddeaux: That’s so true. If you find an older building, – I know this myself has – with good square footage and two or three bedrooms, you stay in it because where else are you going to go? There’s still such a shortage.

Now, that leads into my next question because I’m on the record saying the rental experience in Toronto, particularly, is pretty bad. Again, hard to find anything that has enough space for two people working from home, let alone starting a family, with poor layouts. Obviously, prices are still so disconnected from incomes.

Do you think that’s a fair assessment? And how do you think the rental experience could be improved for people?

Max Steinman: Yeah, it is a somewhat fair assessment. Unfortunately, a lot of people view the rental experience in Canada as a whole as being pretty broken. I do have some optimism that it’s healing in time. I think it is improving.

The reason why so many people are frustrated, though, is two factors:

The first is that we didn’t build a rental product in Canada for the better part of the last five decades. Condo development, in terms of multifamily, was king. Ultimately, these condos did become a major part of the rental stock, but they were originally designed for home ownership, and then in the later decades, in the last two decades, investors really started to seize the opportunity. So many of these condo units ended up in the rental stock.

These buildings – the experiences – they weren’t actually designed for renters. They never were.

They’re ultimately not run by professional rental management companies. The laws and the regulations that govern your rights as a tenant are entirely different than when you rent from a single landlord or an investor. At large, that is one of the key factors that’s driving this.

The other factor, which has been quite damaging over a long period of time, is the implementation of some rent control policies in our major cities. What was ultimately designed to protect renters and certainly may have helped them in the short term, paradoxically, has created a very challenging long-term problem in the market.

The first thing that, unfortunately, rent control has a history of doing is really scaring off [investors] and driving down the supply of new rentals and driving out capital. Obviously, if you take some of the profit upside of a real estate developer by putting caps on achievable revenues, they could just go build in other markets, or they can move their capital somewhere else. Capital can be very fluid. Or they’ll build condos, a different model. You don’t have to worry about it long-term.

You’ve created an environment where supply now is ultimately not keeping up with demand. This is where things really can start to compound. If you think about it, the law of economics, when demand outpaces supply, prices rise.

You get this really odd thing that ultimately happens where there’s this disparity between rents in occupied units that are rent-controlled and units that become available. That disparity starts to grow and grow. Landlords naturally realize that an unoccupied unit is worth a lot more than an occupied unit.

Name one other business where it’s generally a natural occurrence for you to want your longest-term, best customers to actually leave because you will make more money.

There aren’t many businesses – there aren’t many verticals where that’s the case. You actually have a weird scenario that emerges where, as a business owner or a landlord, delivering a subpar experience to their customer is actually better for them. The incentive to adopt new technologies: Why would you improve buildings? Why fix things quickly for residents? Why hold residence events? These aren’t things that ultimately you’re incentivized to do.

That’s so different from any other business vertical on earth. It really is. It’s completely counterintuitive. It’s unfortunately one of the negative externalities of rent control. It really compounds over decades. Our generation is who’s really feeling that, especially new renters who aren’t living in rent-controlled units and getting the upside, the benefit of having those incredibly low rents that are still in place.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Speaking of apartment buildings, which is what most people call purpose-built rentals, and so many have been built over the last little while, and more are coming online.

Why should renters care whether they’re living in a purpose-built rental versus someone’s investment condo?

I’ve only ever lived and rented in condos, actually. What’s the actual difference in day-to-day life?

Max Steinman: Especially if you’re looking for a unit in the downtown core and that’s highly amenitized and gives you that lifestyle renting, up until recently, your only choice was a condo.

I also think one of the challenges that we experience as a generation is that, because purpose-built rentals weren’t built for 50 years, the average consumer, the average Canadian, doesn’t actually know – and I don’t blame them – what the difference between a condo and a purpose-built rental is.

To them, from the exterior, they look the same. They’re, like, a high-rise building.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, just a different landlord, right?

Max Steinman: Exactly. Most of my friends, if you’re just walking down the street with them, they’ll look at a condo, they don’t even know that it’s a rental or vice versa. If you don’t even know the difference between those two, it’s hard to expect people to understand the nuances and the difference from a legal perspective and your rights.

To your point, there are some major differences. The security of your tenancy is far greater in a purpose-built rental. There is no ability for a purpose-built rental owner or management company to renovict you – to say, “Hey, look, we’re repossessing the unit to make improvements.”

There’s no ability for them to take it over for personal use, which is something that we really saw during that run-up of rents, especially in Toronto and Vancouver, where a lot of condo owners were telling their residents, “Hey, look, my nephew is moving in. I need the unit back,” and maybe the nephew would move in for a month and then they’d get the unit back on the market for 20% more.

Those sorts of rights are there. Outside of the rights, there is also the professional management aspect of it – the communication. Most of the newer purpose-built rental developments have some really great tech to help the resident experience. Tech that’s built for renters – sometimes our tech.

It’s a totally different experience, and it’s treated truly like a community, and customer service experience is at the forefront of it, which aligns it with other verticals and other businesses.

Sabrina Maddeaux: A lot of housing advocates love the idea of rent control, and some even want vacancy control, which means landlords can’t jack up rents between tenants. You’ve already said you think this is a really terrible idea, but can you elaborate a bit more on why that is, especially when I’ve had friends whose rents can be jacked up 20%, 50%, year after year if they’re not in one of those rent-controlled units?

Max Steinman: It’s totally understandable, and it’s also understandable why renters can be supportive of those policies because you’re looking for security and you don’t want your rent to go up.

In the short term and at the micro level, it’s a very appealing policy, and that’s why you ultimately end up seeing a lot of capitulation by policymakers to move towards those policies or support those policies.

Even though there have been so many studies, and economists generally always agree that rent control is a long-term pain – it’s like science, but we just ignore the science – and we still see municipalities and provinces across North America that look to adopt stricter rent controls.

We’re seeing it even in New York City with [Zohran] Mamdani running and talking about total rent freezes. It’s always popular if you want to win votes, but the negative externalities are the driving away of capital and in my opinion, the natural wedge that will be created between the landlord and the customer, the tenant, which is that it creates this perverse incentive away from supporting the customer and giving them a great experience and hoping that they stay a long time. Right down to the fact that even if you’re picking a resident, you’re thinking about a resident who is going to fit the mould that’s going to allow you to potentially have another vacancy or availability in a few months.

The negative externalities over time do not outweigh the short-term gain. The problem is the political cycle is four years, right? So you’re trying to win an election, and it’s pretty popular. That’s where we really see, unfortunately, the challenge here. We have to solve most issues over the period of 15, 20 years – not four years.

Then, when you put these policies in place, they’re incredibly unpopular to take away, like you can’t, right? So it just compounds and compounds and compounds. Luckily, new purpose-built rentals, for the most part, in most provinces, aren’t subject to rent control for at least a period of time. I think in Ontario it’s 20 years. If that weren’t the case, there wouldn’t be a single building being built across Ontario or any other province with rent control.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Now, I’ve heard you don’t like the term financialization when it comes to the housing market. And my co-host, Mike, also hates the term. Can you tell me why you find it so problematic?

Max Steinman: Yeah, look, as a generalization, there are always a small minority of bad actors out there.

The term financialization, in my opinion, demonizes the very firms, the very companies, and the organizations that are ultimately going to help us fix the housing affordability crisis.

Unfortunately, the reality, in my opinion at least, is that financialization is just like a synonym of capitalism. If we believe in capitalism, it’s very challenging to single out a specific industry and say, “Well, this industry doesn’t deserve capitalism.”

We all agree, we’re not living in Soviet Russia. So industries should be allowed to financialize. If you don’t let them financialize, capital generally flows to other industries, other sectors, other countries.

On a societal level, I don’t believe there’s any other industry like housing where so much of the narrative deeply and actively roots against the development of an industry.

In many cases, these are some of the best employers and best firms that Canada has to offer. They certainly don’t get the Canadian public rooting for them or the red carpet rolled out like we do for other sectors.

Take the auto sector, where we do anything to protect these guys. The tech sector? We idolize companies in the tech sector, like Rentals.ca, of course, right? Or like big companies in the tech sector that are Canadian giants like Shopify, or in the retail sector, Lululemon, right?

At the end of the day, they’re just financializing, like Shopify is financializing e-commerce checkout engines and websites, and Lululemon is financializing yoga pants, right? At the end of the day, there’s just so much misplaced anger that comes back to the fact that our many levels of government have created huge issues for the market and ultimately disrupted the delivery of this good customer experience, and it’s tainted the whole industry.

I get it, renters, tenancy advocacy groups, and politicians dive into that. The anger is very misplaced towards the industry itself. They’re really the only ones who have the scale and the ability to help dig us out of this affordability crisis. We really need to do a better job of changing the narrative towards the industry.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Speaking of public anger and demonization in the media, a big group that gets that are REITs, and we did an entire episode trying to explain them. Why do you think the perception of them is so bad with the general public?

Max Steinman: Maybe because they’ve been branded with a four-letter acronym, I don’t know. REIT, it’s easy to remember.

Sabrina Maddeaux: They need to rebrand.

Max Steinman: Yeah, exactly. I mean, at the end of the day, a REIT is just a fund for rental housing. There are private REITs, there are public REITs, and there are many ownership structures that are outside of REITs. And they are sometimes just as big under one brand or one landlord. Really, to me, it’s like, it isn’t just REITs, it’s the entire rental housing – professional rental housing industry.

It comes down to there is this non-natural wedge that has been driven between the customer, the renter, and the rental housing provider. It’s unlike and has many more sensitivities than other industries. There’s not this hate on for the auto sector by car drivers, right?

Maybe that boils down to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. At the end of the day, housing and shelter is the most important structures in your life. That’s where the sensitivities are certainly heightened.

Again, I think it is misplaced because when we talk about scale and we talk about capital and moving fast at trying to fix this issue, there’s the government that could help fix it and build 4,000 homes in the next seven years, which is a spit in the ocean. Then there’s the capital and the businesses that have been doing this for decades and can scale.

By the way, these publicly traded REITs, many people own them in their mutual funds. Many people are employed by them, and it’s a huge part of our economy. The construction sector is huge. These are the guys who can get us out of it. So, unfortunately, it’s just this us-versus-them narrative.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Max, I suspect a lot of our audience is already familiar with Rentals.ca, but they might not know how much else you do. Can you tell us a bit more about your company and how you got it started?

Max Steinman: Yeah, for sure. For those who don’t know, Rentals.ca is the largest marketplace in Canada to find a rental home if you’re a renter, and if you’re a landlord, to list your rental property. Truly a marketplace. We sit between both sides.

The parent company, RentSync, has a couple of different software solutions and data solutions for the rental housing industry. Mainly for rental housing providers. All the way from marketing software that helps landlords and property management companies get their units out into the market and list their units, right through to leasing software that helps them sign online leases with prospective tenants and do credit checks and all that sort of stuff.

All the way through the rental application phase, to leasing, through to resident management software. Where, as a tenant, you have a resident app, you can communicate with your renter, pay your rent, and make maintenance requests online. Then we also have a whole data portion of our business as well, with a partnership with Urbanation, where we provide data back to the rental housing industry and real estate developers.

Sabrina Maddeaux: So you’re very busy, which is why I really appreciate you joining us today. Thank you so much for coming on, and thank you, everyone, for listening.

If you want to torture yourself by looking at current rent prices, check out rentals.ca and their monthly rent reports.

Also, thanks to our producer, Meredith Martin. If you have any thoughts about rental horror stories or questions about the rental market, send us an email at [email protected]

We’ll see you next time!