How to find rentals in High Park/Leslieville Areas in Toronto

Hello All

We recently received our PR. We are planning to move to Toronto from California in July this year. I have started doing some research. We are a young family of 3 with a <1 year old baby, so looking at neighborhoods that aren’t too busy (like Midtown Toronto or Downtown Toronto), are lively with parks and some decent number of restaurants and grocery stores in walking distance, but still have good connectivity to union station (office is located nearby) within 30min public transit. Based on my research, I narrowed down to:

  1. High Park
  2. Roncesvalles
  3. Bloor St between Bathurst and Landowne
  4. Leslieville/Riverdale/Danforth area

I see that there are many rental only buildings with floorplans and prices available online in Midtown, downtown, little italy, little portugal, liberty village and other central areas. However, for the neighborhoods I mentioned above, there are hardly any rental-only buildings (or even single family homes for rent) that show up (except Livmore High Park, High Park Village) on padmapper.ca, realtor.ca.

We are looking to see if we can get one floor of a single family house for rent in the above 4 areas (2 bedroom). If not that, then some low rise apartment complex would be best (not many high rises in these areas). Is going through a real estate agent the best bet? We plan to stay in an AirBnB for 1 month and hunt for places.

@deepac @siddEE

All the neighbourhoods you’ve highlighted is excellent. I would also add Corktown (mostly comprises of apartment buildings) very close to distillery district and corktown commons park, walking to Lesliville and a little longish walk to Union. I would also add Beaches on the east end. Great public transport and connectivity to Union.

The reason for low inventory at this point could be that there is very little movement in the winter. You’ll start seeing more listings in the Spring (around May) and also in Summer (June, July, Aug) when schools end and families move in and out. Generally the listings go up only a month or maybe two in advance.

There is no harm going with a real estate agent as you don’t have to pay them (they get their commission from the landlord). In our case we did have a real estate agent showing us around but in the end we found the rental on our own. It took us 3 weeks to find the place after we moved to Toronto so one month in an airbnb should be ok.

Great, thanks for the info @deepac Hopefully more inventory opens up in summer. I will look into the other neighborhoods you mentioned

Hi. We are considering renting a house in Riverdale/Leslieville area. We are considering signing lease before we actually move to Toronto. I am not sure if that is a good idea.

In most of the houses listed online, the owner lives on one of the floors. I have a few questions:

  1. What should I look for when renting virtually without seeing the place, apart from floor plan and pictures? Are there specific important things I should clarify?
  2. Once a year or so, my parents might come visit and stay for a month. I think this is not a problem in apartment buildings, but would a house with owner living on one floor create issues with that?

CC @deepac