THE GREAT HUNT
Two Ottawans, one month, a dozen viewings and loads of frustration in a market that’s red hot
Ottawa’s residential rental market is red-hot, with demand and prices ballooning and vacancies increasingly scarce. A government report issued just last year said that tight rental market conditions had led landlords to raise rents across the city. Taylor Blewett reports that, nearly 12 months later, a situation that was tight has become suffocating
Most people would say Emily Kestle and Tristan Cordeau were doing everything right when it came to finding a rental apartment in Ottawa.
They agreed on their specs and budget — an unfurnished one-bedroom unit with parking, somewhere between Little Italy and Lowertown, for $1,200 — but they were willing to compromise a little when it came to price and nice-to-haves but not-necessaries, like in-unit laundry.
As expectations go, theirs seemed realistic. “We’re looking for something that’s not terrible,” Kestle said. “Just somewhere relatively clean.”
The pair started rental viewings with a handshake and introduction. Kestle — a fifth-and-finalyear University of Ottawa student, tutor and academic writing adviser — and Cordeau, a software engineer working in Kanata, were pleasant and polite.
They had rented before, so they knew what questions to ask and how the game works.
You find a place on a rental website, then call the posted number to book a viewing. You show up early, make a good impression, and if you like the place, you submit your rental application, cross your fingers, and eventually, you’ll be someone’s chosen tenant.
Or so they thought.
With data compiled by the Citizen suggesting a rental market crunch in Ottawa — prices are rising and vacancies are sparse — this reporter decided to find a pair of prospective renters to follow on their hunt for a place to live.
When I met Kestle in early July, she and Cordeau had been on the rental hunt since May. They had sent dozens of emails in response to rental ads and viewed six or seven places. But “nothing was really sticking,” Kestle said, with a note of frustration colouring her otherwise cheerful summation of the past two months.
“The tricky thing we’re finding is that as soon as a place goes up, it’s down again in a day.”
The weekend prior, they had applied for and lost an ideal apartment to someone who had submitted her paperwork minutes earlier.
“You’ve got to be able to make moves fast. There’s not really time to be like, ‘Well I don’t know,’” Kestle said.
In a separate interview, Cordeau agreed. “The competition is pretty wild.”
I found Kestle and Cordeau by way of Kijiji’s “wanted” section, and they kindly agreed to allow me to report on their experience.
Over the course of a month, I watched them navigate a rental search that proved to be by turns hilarious, harrowing and instructive for the young couple.
“As someone who went through five years of university, my process for renting was always just kind of succumbing to the system and having to get whatever room I could take,” Cordeau said. “Sometimes that would be a room in somebody’s basement, and sometimes it would be a really crappy apartment.
“I’ve never really taken the time up until now to try and find an apartment that I like. So this time it’s different.”
With Cordeau having entered the working world and Kestle on the verge of graduation, they were ready to move in together to their first “adult” apartment.
The tale of their hunt offers only a small window into the state of Ottawa’s rental market. Over the course of the past few months, the Citizen heard numerous stories from people trying to find places in a red-hot market — from viewing lineups that stretched out the door to bidding wars in the middle of a showing.
And while Kestle and Cordeau’s rental needs are specific to them, their budget falls within the range of what an average two-bedroom unit in Ottawa costs. Like many others hunting for a rental in this city, the pair don’t have the flexibility and freedom that a high-end budget allows, but they also don’t face the same restrictions as those operating with a low-end budget.
Similar to her boyfriend, Kestle has bounced between different Ottawa rental accommodations for the last few years, never staying anywhere longer than eight months.
In July, she was subletting a room in a house with five other people that featured sticky floors, one functioning bathroom (for weeks), and a dining table that doubled as a beer pong platform.
“There’s quite a distinction between student living and living somewhere … livable,” she said with a laugh.
“I’ve moved around a lot. So it would be really nice to have a place where we can just kind of settle into it and stay there for a while.”
The goal was to find a place before the end of July, for an Aug. 1 or Sept. 1 move-in.
On July 18, a Wednesday, Kestle had two viewings set up. Both were marked in the Google Doc organizer she used to keep track of potential rentals — each entry annotated with its location, asking price, landlord contact information and status (“voicemail left,” for example, or “viewing scheduled”).
She and Cordeau had honed a system for finding and pursuing rentals of interest.
“During the week, we email back and forth while we’re at work. If I have some downtime, I’ll take 15 minutes, scroll through Kijiji, favourite a bunch of them and send all the URLs to him.”
The tricky thing is we’re finding that as soon as a place goes up, it’s down again in a day. ... You’ve got to be able to make moves fast.
The rental market is so competitive right now that ads would sometimes be pulled down by the time Cordeau went to open them or would have racked up hundreds of page visits.
In cases where they both liked the place and it was still available, they would typically both email or call the advertised contact and go with the first scheduled viewing they could arrange.
“If I have questions to ask that haven’t been clarified in the info on an advertisement page … I’ll bring them to the viewing,” Kestle said.
Time was of the essence, because “there’s always somebody who’s just a little bit more desperate than you are,” who’s willing to pay more or commit to a rental on the spot if they get there first.
The week before, they had been “ghosted” by two landlords with whom they thought they’d established a good relationship. After initial contact and tentative viewing setups, the landlords vanished, unreachable (likely having found tenants already, Kestle reasoned).
The first viewing that Wednesday was a one-bedroom plus study in the northern ByWard Market. For the spacious, renovated unit with a breakfast bar, hardwood floors and gas fireplace, the landlord was asking $1,150 plus utilities and $75 for parking, which Kestle required.
She was impressed. “Beautiful, beautiful place,” she concluded following her viewing. In fact, she said later, it was the nicest they’d seen in that price range. Her only concern was the additional cost of utilities, which at around $150, would put the couple just beyond their ideal budget.
That night, Kestle and Cordeau submitted their rental application anyway and crossed their fingers. They sat down to budget out all the costs and found away to make it work. The landlord told Kestle she’d review all applicants at the end of the week. Cordeau also gave the landlord a call, to introduce himself and put a voice to the name on their application — anything to help them stand out.
After days of silence, the landlord broke the news: She went with another tenant, whose application was ahead of theirs in the queue.
En route to the second viewing that Wednesday, a one-bedroom in a low-rise apartment building in Sandy Hill, Kestle pointed to plac- es she’d already looked at, online or in-person, laying out their various prosandcons.
“If you’re in Sandy Hill ... you’re paying to be in Sandy Hill. We looked at a place that was completely run down, it was a bachelor that was $1,200,” she said.
While they might have been able to find more affordable rental options outside of the city’s core neighbourhoods, Kestle and Cordeau were constrained by their need to live in an area where Cordeau could bus to his job in Kanata, and she could walk to the University of Ottawa campus in a reasonable time frame.
Kestle also said renting across the bridge in comparatively cheap Gatineau was off the table due to the jump in income tax they would have to pay as Quebec residents.
This Sandy Hill unit was also listed for $1,150 monthly, plus hydro and water tank rental. As she walked up flights of stairs to the apartment, Kestle noted the absence of an elevator, which would present a challenge come move-in day. The apartment was small but tidy, and sported some novel features like exposed brick in the kitchen and access to a shared rooftop deck. But the landlord couldn’t guarantee her a parking spot — a deal-breaker for the price — and she found storage space to be lacking.
Just in case, she asked the landlord if she could take a video to show her partner the space — another part of their routine when they can’t get to viewings together.
“It’s funny how you kind of, maybe subconsciously, start using different language,” she pointed out earlier. “I never, ever use the word ‘boyfriend’ (when engaging with landlords),” she said. Nor would she offer up her status as a student. In a tight rental market where landlords can pick and choose between potential tenants, their relative youth and the student stigma might be possible points against them.
In conversation with the landlord after the viewing, talk turned to the state of the Ottawa rental market. In the two days since posting the ad for this apartment, he’d received 40 requests to view it. He said he’d never seen this kind of demand before.
He offered a valuable glimpse into a landlord’s mindset. He said he typically chooses a tenant who shows up to a viewing with a rental application in hand. There are sample templates available online and showing up prepared to committo a unit will make you stand out from the pack, he said. Though she didn’t apply for the unit, Kestle later vowed to add this trick to her repertoire for future viewings.
The following day, Kestle and Cordeau had each booked a viewing. Cordeau’s fell through when the landlord informed them the $1,430 downtown condo rental had since been spoken for. As the search wore on, they had to become more flexible on price, Cordeau said, as well as other wishlist items such as the inclusion of utilities in the set monthly rent.
“It seems impossible to find an apartment that has everything.”
Undaunted, Kestle headed to check out another apartment in the ByWard Market. Despite her vow not to rent from a large propertymanagement company — she’s had negative experiences in the past — the bright, airy unit she saw in the PadMapper ad for $1,100 monthly was too appealing to pass up.
Upon arrival, we were taken downstairs to a basement unit. When Kestle protested that this wasn’t the same unit pictured in the ad, she was informed by the company employee that it had already been rented, but he could show us this apartment instead. The cramped, furnished unit was not at all what Kestle was looking for.
“Definitely disappointing,” she said after making a polite exit, comparing the experience to being catfished by a prospective partner. “If you take a look at the pictures … it’s absolutely nothing like that, not even a little bit.”
Even so, she wasn’t discouraged by the rental search thus far. “With this practice, I feel like we’re getting better at it and more efficient.
“It’s almost like every week is a reset. At the end of the week we can basically infer that any place we’ve reached out to is gone.
“Sunday, Monday we’ll clear the Google doc, we’ll send out 20 or 30 emails, and then we’ll just wait.”
Fast forward 12 days, two Google Doc resets, and a few more disappointing, bait-and-switch apartment viewings. Kestle and Cordeau were still without a place to call their own on the last day of July.
Cordeau was living comfortably enough in his longtime student apartment in Little Italy, but Kestle was giving up her sublet and heading back home to Barrie for the month of August, so finding some- thing to rent in Ottawa for the start of school in September was urgent.
“I’ve also started inquiring about some wanted roommate ads (because), I mean, we don’t want to force living together if it’s in an overpriced, tiny, compromise apartment,” Kestle said.
She was hopeful about the viewing she had scheduled that afternoon — a two-bedroom unit in the southwest corner of Centretown. The inclusion of utilities and inunit laundry softened the bite of a $1,380 monthly rent.
With less than a week left in Ottawa before returning home, Kestle wasn’t messing around. If she liked the unit, she was ready to commit on the spot and sign a lease with Cordeau that night. “We just don’t want another place to slip between our fingers.”
After viewing the place — not perfect, but quirky-cute, with tile floors throughout, a large, sunken master bedroom, and the faint smell of cigarette smoke in the stairwell — she offered their pre-written application to the landlord, who informed her that he had a specific process for interested tenants, and would send her the information that evening.
On the drive home, she wondered aloud if this unit was “the one.” Earlier in the rental search, she might have passed it over and continued looking for the perfect apartment. But it had been a long three months.
That night, Kestle and Cordeau sent the landlord a deposit contingent on them getting the unit — without which, he informed them, they wouldn’t be considered.
A visit to Kijiji showed his ad had racked up more than 970 page views in two days.
The couple upped the ante by offering $1,400 in monthly rent ($20 more than the asking price), filled out the landlord’s application form, and settled in to wait for an answer.
Finally, finally, it was the one they were hoping for. It took months longer and hundreds of dollars more than they initially planned for, but Kestle and Cordeau secured a rental lease nonetheless.
They signed their contract Aug. 3, less than a month from the day they move into the apartment they can call their first shared home.
While this rental story came to a happy conclusion, countless others are playing out across Ottawa.
As Kestle and Cordeau can attest, looking for a home in a hot market requires patience and persistence to be successful. But if you don’t give up, it’s that much sweeter when you finally find one.