Real estate signage showing a home for rent on May 15, 2023, in Montreal.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
Angela Sealy, 77, is a content lifelong renter. She immigrated to Canada in 1967 from Barbados, and lived in Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia while completing her bachelor’s and master’s degrees.
Buying a home may seem like an important goal for many new Canadians, but for Ms. Sealy, it was never on the agenda.
“[Renting] was a lot easier for me … there’s this desperate need [in Canada] to purchase something that I find peculiar,” said Ms. Sealy, who’s been a resident of New Westminster, a Vancouver suburb, since 1980. She sees owning a home as a financial burden, especially for people doing it on one paycheque: “Having a down payment is wonderful, but that’s where the expenses begin.”
When people think of single people who rent, they might envision a young professional or someone who can’t yet afford to buy. And while millennials might be the face of solo renting, seniors like Ms. Sealy make up the dominant share of solo renter households in Canada. Whether seniors renting alone are doing so because of divorce or death of a spouse, downsizing in retirement, personal preference or other reasons, doing so in Canada’s pricey rental market can have implications for their financial security and retirement plans.
According to a December report by North American real estate search site Point2Homes, seniors aged 65 and older represent 32.5 per cent of single-person rental households. The study, which relies on Statistics Canada 2021 census data, found tenants aged 25 to 34 make up 18.5 per cent of solo renters, a share almost identical to renters aged 55 to 64.
Rents have been easing recently on a national basis, but they are still well above prepandemic levels. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Canada was $1,876 in February, a 2.4-per-cent year-over-year decline. That unit would rent for $2,522 in Vancouver, down 6 per cent year-over-year, and $2,353 in Toronto, down 6.3 per cent from last year.
Renters are twice as likely to spend more than 30 per cent of their income on housing than homeowners, according to Statscan data released last year, and the agency has found single-person households broadly to be more likely than other household types to be living in unaffordable or unsuitable housing.
A 2024 report by National Institute on Ageing at Toronto Metropolitan University, which surveyed nearly 6,000 Canadians over 50, found renters and single-person households were less likely to feel financially secure and were less ready for retirement.
The report also found higher rates of “material deprivation” among renters and single-person households. Respondents were identified as materially deprived if they couldn’t afford at least two essentials from a list including unexpected expenses, spending money, small gifts, bills, maintaining a comfortable temperature in their home, transportation and more.
Alyssa Brierley, executive director of the NIA, said there are policy interventions at the provincial and municipal level that could support senior renters. Some of those include municipal rent banks that provide financial support to tenants behind on their rent and tenant protections such as rent control and rules preventing renovictions.
Quebec stands out in this regard, she said, with comprehensive protections against renovictions and a board that regulates lease agreements and rent increases.
In Ontario, landlords are required to make accessibility modifications requested by tenants, but she said enforcing this can be “very challenging,” and can put a target on the back of older renters, who tend to be long-term tenants paying below-market rent.
Brenda Hiscock, certified financial planner at Objective Financial Partners in Markham, Ont., said she has a number of older clients choosing to sell their homes in retirement, and while the majority ultimately downsize into a condo, a number are choosing to rent, using the equity from their home sale to live their life with more flexibility.
When building a financial plan for renters, she will sometimes model their rent costs increasing at a rate above inflation. She also builds a financial buffer to account for potential long-term care needs, given that many renters can’t leverage home equity to cover care costs.
She also has a contingent of clients approaching or in retirement who’ve been living in their apartments for years at below-market rent, for whom she models their retirement plan using market-rate rent.
“So many of those clients in those buildings are coming to me saying, ‘Brenda, I have to move’: the building is being sold, or they’re renovating,” she said. “Often those situations can’t last forever.”
It’s something that’s on Joy Edwards’s mind. The 70-year-old has been living in the same Toronto apartment since the 1980s, when she got divorced. While her rent for a two-bedroom apartment is well below the Toronto average, it eats up 60 per cent of her monthly Canada Pension Plan and Old Age Security payments.
Ms. Edwards said she was able to retire by minimizing her expenses and sometimes receiving some food from her church and a local community centre. But with developers expressing interest in her building, she said she worries “all the time” about being asked to leave.
“If I was to go somewhere else, I would probably have to pay two times the amount,” she said. Ms. Edwards said she’s been on the subsidized housing waitlist for years.
Ms. Hiscock said senior renters can try asking for longer-term rental agreements, or look for buildings catering specifically to seniors. These buildings, different from retirement communities or long-term care, typically feature units with more accessibility features than regular apartments and social activities. Some buildings also include medical supports for tenants.
However, she cautioned that some senior-friendly rentals initially appear to have ultralow rent, but come with mandatory meal plans that inflate monthly costs significantly.
Ms. Sealy is in a good spot: she rents a two-bedroom apartment in an older building with a view of an “absolutely gorgeous” tree for below market rent. A long-time affordable housing advocate, Ms. Sealy said she’s mindful of the impact of rent increases on her future retirement budget.
“The rent will go up,” she said. “Fortunately here in B.C. the government sets the rate of how much it can go up, and we also have a lot of housing advocates who try to keep a lid on that sort of thing. I happen to be one of those.”
