A Toronto Rental Registry

Rental registry, Housing transparency

A Toronto Rental Registry: Bringing Transparency and Accountability to Our Housing Market

Toronto has a housing affordability problem and a housing-information problem. We talk about rents, renovictions, neglected buildings, and affordability, yet the City still lacks one system showing what is happening to rental housing unit by unit. As Mayor, I would pursue a Toronto Residential Rental Registry and Rent Transparency System, learning from Dubai’s Ejari while designing for Ontario law and Toronto’s market.

Organizing principle

Know the property. Know the rent. Know the history. Protect personal privacy. Make information work for the public.

What a mayor can deliver

Deliver: Close the RentSafeTO information gap. RentSafeTO covers rental apartment buildings with at least three storeys and 10 units: registration, evaluations, complaints, and published scores. It is a building-standards program, not a registry of individual tenancies, and it skips condos, townhouses, and basement apartments. Examine how Toronto can close that gap.

Deliver: Secure digital registry of rental units and new tenancies, within Toronto authority, Ontario’s Residential Tenancies Act, and privacy law. Record address and unit, owner or authorized manager, tenancy start and end, rent at start, later registered rent changes, rent-control status, and relevant City property-standard data. Tenant names and personal information stay off public search.

Deliver: Pre-lease transparency for renters. Before signing, look up useful unit facts. Example framing only: prior rent $2,050 vs advertised $2,600, when that tenancy ended, whether rent control applies, and outstanding City property-standard violations. Ontario’s guideline generally limits increases during a covered tenancy, not on turnover. Units first occupied after November 15, 2018 are often exempt.

Deliver: Protect good tenants and good landlords. Not an anti-landlord system. A verified record of rent, dates, and responsible owner or manager can cut factual disputes. Good landlords can show proper registration and compliance. Integrate with RentSafeTO instead of another disconnected bureaucracy. From June 2026, registered buildings also show colour-coded score signs.

Deliver: Better anonymized rental data for policy. Track rents by neighbourhood, building type, and unit type; tenancy changes; rapid-increase areas; secondary rental supply; and whether affordability policies work. Registration can become data infrastructure, a lesson from Dubai’s Ejari without copying it blindly.

Deliver: Public business case before any savings claim. Do not invent millions in taxpayer savings before analysis. Possible savings: less duplicated admin, automated verification, prioritizing higher-risk buildings, resolving facts online, and RentSafeTO integration. Toronto already charges RentSafeTO owners a 2026 annual fee of $30.82 per residential unit, plus cost-recovery fees for audits and some enforcement. Require a public business case: implementation cost + annual operating cost + anticipated admin savings + cost-recovery revenue + measurable enforcement-streamlining savings before any millions claim.

Deliver: One registration, one record, better accountability. Longer term, connect rental registration, property standards, inspections, outstanding orders, and other legally publishable property information so residents are not forced through multiple databases to understand a home’s condition and history.

Deliver: Staff legal, tech, and financial business case. Ask City staff for the legal, technological, and financial business case, consulting tenants, small landlords, institutional providers, privacy experts, and the Province of Ontario.

What I’ll fight for

Advocate: Provincial alignment under the Residential Tenancies Act so a Toronto registry works with Ontario rent-guideline, turnover, and exemption rules rather than inventing City power the RTA does not grant.

Advocate: Privacy-respecting coordination with the Province where it improves tenant protection and housing policy without putting tenant personal information on a public search.

Honest line: Pursue a registry within City authority and Ontario’s Residential Tenancies Act. Tenant personal information is not publicly searchable. Do not invent millions in taxpayer savings before a public business case. Housing transparency will not solve Toronto’s housing crisis by itself, but we cannot properly manage a housing market that we cannot properly see.

Toronto can learn from international cities without copying them blindly. Dubai’s Ejari shows what systematic rental registration makes possible. Toronto already has RentSafeTO and substantial housing data infrastructure. The next question is how those tools can be connected and expanded within Ontario law.

From my op-ed: My plan for Toronto

As mayor, I will do two things the City has the power to do:

1. Register every rental. Every rental unit in Toronto, from tower apartments to basement units and rented condos, will be registered with the City. We will build on RentSafeTO, which today covers only larger apartment buildings, so that no rental is left out.
2. Publish a Toronto rent index. Using registry data, the City will publish what similar units actually rent for in every neighbourhood. Free, online, in every language our residents speak.

What I will fight Queen’s Park for

• Restore rent control on units first occupied after 2018, which today have none.
• Limit how much rent can jump between tenants, using real data on what fair rent is.
• Fix the Landlord and Tenant Board so tenants get a hearing in weeks, not months.

Read the full article: Rent in the Dark: Why Toronto Needs a Rent Registry →

Questions? Email bethechangeno1@gmail.com, call (647) 785-3729