Over the past couple of years, my wife and I have indulged idle daydreams of getting in on the latest investment-real-estate gold rush by going into the “home-sharing” business. I once spent an afternoon looking at condo unit sales prices and doing math about potential daily rates; Rebecca will sometimes say to me, “We should have bought the house next door when it was for sale and listed its three apartments on Airbnb.” We’ll talk about how we would decorate and advertise, how we’d arrange cleaning and key drops around our schedules, how much cash might come our way.It’s not actually a plan — we have neither the financial capital nor the inclination to actually do it. For us, it’s just the familiar middle-class imagining of easy money. Like talking about how you’d spend lottery winnings, or envy-searching New Brunswick mansions listed for relative pennies on realtor.ca, or planning the perfect heist. But for many Torontonians — even some we know — it isn’t just a conversation topic, it’s a business. And the collective effect of all those businesses on the Toronto apartment rental market is beginning to look like a kind of heist — snatching what have been homes, or would-be homes, right out from under tenants and selling them by the day to tourists. It’s not hard to see why the owner of an investment property would make the choice. The average monthly rent on a one-bedroom condo downtown in Toronto is $1,800. That number itself sounds outrageously expensive — it is outrageously expensive — but at $200-$300 per night for the same condo during the tourist season, you can make that monthly amount per week renting it out on Airbnb. Some friends of ours who went the home-sharing route after their basement apartment tenants left (of their own accord) said they can make a year’s worth of rental income in two months of the summer by using ...
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