Big Moves Require the Best Information
Most people do not look forward to finding a new apartment. Incomplete information, fuzzy pictures, unreliable landlords, driving around for viewings: the list of annoying and boring parts to apartment hunting goes on and on. To make the process as painless as possible, it is very important to start with the best apartment rental site for the city or region you’re looking at. A good site will help you to quickly find the gems and weed out the flops by providing all the information necessary to limit your search range and find the perfect place for your needs.
For this article we have reviewed all of the major apartment rental sites for the Greater Toronto Area, and narrowed the list down to the top 5 based on the quality of the search function, the number of units listed, and ease of use. Don’t get your apartment hunting started off on the wrong foot by using a second class site. These are by far the 5 best apartment rental sites in Toronto, and they should be your first stop in your apartment hunting journey.
This plain-looking site is a long-time workhorse of the online apartment rental industry in Canada. Its many years of reputable service make it the go-to-site for people who regularly move between apartments. It allows searching by rental company (which most other sites don’t have), neighborhood, preferred residence type (one bedroom, bachelor, etc) and price. It also has an option for providing photos, which is a must in today’s apartment-renting world. Best of all it has a function that allows you to save the results of your queries and to receive email notifications when new matching listings appear.
This property rental site is the best choice if you are looking for apartments in specific neighborhoods because of its easy-to-use design based on maps of the city. Their search filter is state-of-the-art with all of the expected options, and also allows you to search based on the type of rental contract you are looking for (sublet, lease, vacation, etc). It has a very thorough set of listings, as all of the available apartments are drawn from sites like Kijiji and Craigslist.
This is a website that grew out of a long-time rental magazine called 4Rent. The site offers a streamlined search in both list and map format, which is great for when you need an apartment, but have no idea where to start. It has all of the standard search parameters, and allows you to save your searches. It has a lot of handy information about various property management companies and helpful hints about renting and moving thanks to its long history in the rental industry. This is a great site for first time or infrequent renters, as it will provide you with the kind of information that you may need yet don’t have the experience to know to look for.
right site for you. This site features a layout and style that is similar to Padmappers, but with fewer bells and whistles and a plainer look. This site is most popular for finding apartments that are managed by professional companies, which cuts a lot of noise out of your search if you aren’t interested in non-professional landlords. The site’s set-up allows you to search by building, and then look at all of the available apartments in that specific building, instead of having to search by apartment. Most of the listings are very professional and include floor plans, photos and even virtual tours.
Casalova
This last choice was added because of its unique feature where landlords and tenants can rate each other, which provides a level of detailed information that is hard to find anywhere else on the internet. Unfortunately the added detail of the information comes at the cost of many fewer listings. However, if you can’t afford to rent from a professional management company and you don’t want to get stuck in a year or longer nightmare lease with a terrible landlord,