The fine folks at the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board have released their 2026 Q1 report on the rental market. The report focuses on condominium rental units, both condo apartments as well as townhouses, in Toronto, York, Peel, Halton, Durham, Dufferin and Simcoe.
Here’s a link to the full report if you want to check it out.
As always, we reviewed the data to see what’s worth noting. Let’s get into it!
More…but also less.
The report shows that across the TRREB boundaries (the GTA and a bit beyond) apartment rentals rose about 11% year-over-year, from 14,800 leases in Q1 2025 to 16,400 in Q1 2026. In the same periods, listings rose 6%, from 22,600 to 24,000, so supply remained heavy enough to preserve renter choice and negotiating power.
Put another way, more places were rented in this first quarter of 2026 than in the first quarter of 2025, but we also saw a somewhat smaller increase in the number of places for rent. If you combine those two things – an increase in demand, with a smaller increase in supply – you’d naturally assume that rental prices would be going up.
Instead, rents fell across every apartment bedroom type, which is a bit of a head scratcher. Average apartment rents were lower year-over-year for bachelors, one-bedrooms, two-bedrooms, and three-bedrooms. The biggest winner (for tenants) is the one-bedroom average rent, which fell 4.1% to $2,246 from $2,343. That’s about $100 less per month that landlords of these units are receiving in rent.
Two-bedrooms fell 3.2% to $2,939, and three-bedrooms fell 2.7% to $3,757, so it seems like the bigger, higher priced rental units did better than the smaller, cheaper places. This is likely due to the level of supply, as while demand for family-size units has only increased over the last number of years, developers have focused on the smaller, single person or couple occupancy units.
Renting out a place? You’re probably in Toronto.
Another interesting aspect of the report is that Toronto still dominated apartment leasing volume. Out of 16,365 apartment leases across all TRREB areas, the City of Toronto accounted for 11,411, or roughly 70% of total apartment rental transactions. Toronto Central alone had 8,783 leases, making it the core of the rental market with more than half of rentals taking place there.
York Region had meaningful apartment volume, but at lower average rents than Toronto. York Region had 1,908 apartment leases in Q1 2026. Its average one-bedroom rent was $2,165, compared with $2,322 in Toronto Central. Two-bedrooms averaged $2,732 in York Region, compared with $3,186 in Toronto Central.
While York is often the home of the highest average priced property in the GTA (trading places with Halton on some months), the average price for a condo unit in York is comparable to the average in Toronto, so while landlords in York are getting lower rent, they also paid less for their units.
Ready to rent? Consider a townhouse.
The final odd aspect that we found in the report was in the rental townhouse portion of the market. While the level of activity was pretty stable when compared year over year, the average rent dropped considerably.
When we compare Q1 of this year to Q1 of 2025, townhouse leases were nearly flat, rising 1.7% year-over-year from 1,156 to 1,176. In the same time comparison, average townhouse rents fell overall, with three-bedroom townhouse rents down 7.5% year-over-year. This is contrary to the condo apartment segment of the rental market, which as we mentioned, had larger three-bedroom units see the smallest average drop in rental prices of all the types of condo units.
Our take on this is that tenants who were renting out townhouses were most likely to have seen the comparable cost of owning a place equalize over the past year. As purchase prices dropped in many segments of the markets across the GTA, a tenant who was already paying considerable money to rent a townhouse began to see prices that would carry for similar numbers to their current rent. It seems that townhouse landlords had to make their rental rates more attractive to continue to appeal to tenants for their property who might otherwise look to jump into the property market themselves.
Every segment of the market – whether it is rental or for sale, condo or freehold, entry level or high end – has its own trends, rhythms and cycles. If you’re thinking about buying or selling, renting or renting out, then you need to work with agents who understand the market you’re focused upon. Get in touch with us to hear our thoughts on how to best move you forward!
