Landlords have offered a few months of free rent or parking, gift cards and complimentary Wi-Fi as ways to entice prospective tenants to move-in, but one developer is now offering tenants in Toronto the ability to accrue Aeroplan points every time they pay rent.
Canada’s largest purpose-built developer, Fitzrovia, recently partnered with Chexy, a Toronto-based fintech company, to provide that option to both current and prospective tenants at all of its buildings throughout the Greater Toronto Area.
Once a lease agreement is signed, tenants can receive between 5,000 to 50,000 Aeroplan points as a bonus. Then, with monthly rental payments, residents can earn up to two Aeroplan points for every dollar paid.
Through Chexy’s platform, residents can pay their monthly bill through debit—where there is no transaction fee applied with pre-authorized payments—or their credit cards, with fees waived for the first three months before a 1.75 per cent fee is applied after.
“We think, at a time when incentives and discounts are everywhere in housing, we’re making a different kind of bet and that’s obviously on loyalty,” Adrian Rocca, founder and CEO of Fitzrovia, told CTV News Toronto in an interview, when asked how this incentive took flight.
“We see that loyalty not as a marketing perk, but a long-term investment in the relationships with our tenants.”
Liza Akhlevdziani Carew, co-founder and CEO at Chexy, assured anyone who moves out will still be able to access their Aeroplan points as they will be connected to their Aeroplan membership and their Chexy account.
“There’s no way for anybody to claw that back,” Carew said. “You can earn and redeem it along the way, and they’re never going to go away.”
While not every landlord throughout the Greater Toronto Area is offering this kind of move-in incentive, real estate analysis firm Zoocasa’s CEO Carrie Lysenko says more and more purpose-built rental projects are offering perks to draw tenants in.
“I would say about 65 per cent of purpose-built rental projects across the GTA offered incentives in the last quarter, and that’s up about 36 per cent year-over-year,” Lysenko said. “They are trying to get renters into their properties to pay their mortgage.”
Urbanation recently reported nearly a third of purpose-built rentals across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area are offering two months or more of free rent, which is up from 11 per cent in 2024. Thirty-one per cent offered one or one-and-a-half months of free rent alongside other incentives like free or reduced parking, locker rentals or cash move-in bonuses.
Tony Irwin, president and CEO of the Federation of Rental Housing Providers of Ontario (FRHP), said with more units on the market, rent is softening and Toronto’s rental market is seeing the impact of supply and demand where landlords are searching for other ways to attract tenants.
“I think that’s obviously why you see some coming up with different offers that they can make, whether it be free rent, whether it be free internet, whether it be free parking, things like that,” Irwin told CTV News Toronto.
“When you’re in an environment as we are right now, where there are more options available, perhaps, than have been the case in other times… builders are looking to lease them up and they look at ways that they can perhaps (be) innovative in this case, ways that they can set themselves apart from others in the same space.”
Findings from a joint report, published by Urbanation, the Building Industry and Land Development Association and Finnegan Marshall, reveal rental vacancy rates in the GTA reached the highest level seen in the last 15 years in 2024, at 2.5 per cent.
This was largely due to the number of purpose-built condo rentals that popped up throughout the region, where roughly 35,000 units were built last year, more than double the 10-year average growth.
This year, in the third quarter, Urbanation noted a 3.5 per cent vacancy rate for purpose-built rental projects completed since 2000 in the GTHA, which is nearly double what it was two years ago.
There were also nearly 25,000 purpose-built rental units under construction as of the third quarter of 2025, according to Urbanation, representing the highest number of new rental developments in the last five decades.
“We are in a unique position where we have more units listed, the most units listed actually since 2020,” Lysenko said. “There’s a couple of factors at play here. We’ve obviously seen from the government a pullback on the amount of immigration that we are absorbing in the country and setting different targets year-over-year to kind of bring that back to a more sustainable level for a number of infrastructure for, I mean, housing affordability certainly feeds into that.”
International student caps are also contributing to the pullback of demand, Lysenko says, boosting the availability seen in apartment and condo rentals available.
This substantial inventory seen in Toronto’s marketplace over the past year has softened rental costs, the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB) noted.
“High inventory has translated into negotiating power for renters, resulting in downward trending average rents,” the TRREB’s latest rental market report reads.
The average cost of a one-bedroom cost across the GTA, for example, was $2,355 in the third quarter of 2025, reflecting a 5.8 per cent decline in price from 2024.
With more purpose-built rentals providing competitive options, and many units still under construction, the TRREB says renters will likely have “substantial choice” in the upcoming months.
