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Legal insuranceYour lease is not where the rules live. A condo tenant is bound by a declaration they never signed — and when they breach it, the corporation doesn't chase them. It charges you, and the charge attaches to your unit ahead of your mortgage. Here's the second rulebook, and the deadline most owners miss by three weeks.
Legal insuranceMoving away doesn't change your obligations under the RTA — but crossing the tax-residency line changes who your tenant owes money to. A Tax Court case put six years of your tax bill on a tenant who had no idea. Here's what actually changes when you leave, and what to set up before you go.
Legal insuranceOntario has no single heating law. Your minimum temperature and your heating season come from your municipality — and Toronto's dates moved in 2025, which most guides still haven't noticed. What the province requires, what four cities require, and the winter obligations that start before you think.
Legal insuranceMost Ontario landlords screen on income first — three times the rent, or a 30% cut-off. The Human Rights Commission says that rule is illegal, and the regulation makes income the one tool you can't use on its own. Credit and rental history can stand alone. Income can't. Here's what you may actually ask.
Location specificEvery guide tells you to put all five students on one joint lease so they're each liable for the whole rent. Waterloo's licensing bylaw says one tenant per lease. The structure you were told protects you may be the one your licence prohibits — and the year is decided in January, not September.
Location specificYour lot decides which rulebook you get: touch a public laneway and it's a laneway suite, don't and it's a garden suite. You get one, never both. But the two things most likely to kill the project — emergency access and a protected tree — aren't in the zoning bylaw at all.
Location specificOntario made basement apartments legal almost everywhere — and that's the half-truth that costs landlords the most. Bill 23 fixed the zoning. It didn't touch the Building Code or the Fire Code. A suite is legal only when all three line up, and the numbers you'll google disagree with each other.
Location specificRent a five-bedroom house to five students on one joint lease and it's an ordinary rental. Rent the same house to the same five people on five separate room leases and it's a multi-tenant house needing a licence. Same house, same tenants — the lease structure decides. And the rules flip hard by city.
Location specificOntario's vacant home taxes are municipal, not provincial — Toronto charges 3%, Ottawa and Hamilton 1%, many cities nothing. But the real trap isn't the rate. In every city with the tax, you must declare your home occupied every year, even if you live there — miss the deadline and it's automatically deemed vacant and taxed.
Location specificOntario has no province-wide Airbnb rule — every city sets its own. The dividing line for investors is the principal-residence rule: most big cities allow a short-term rental only in the home you actually live in, so a pure investment property often can't be one. But it flips by city, and the 28-day line changes everything.
Location specificThere's no province-wide landlord licence in Ontario — licensing is municipal, patchwork, and changing fast. Some cities license small rentals of 1–4 units; others only register large apartment buildings; many require nothing. This tracker sorts the two regimes city by city, with a hard verify-lesson: the fee you read last year may already be wrong.
Location specificAsk which property type "rents best" and you'll get a confident answer from whoever you ask — condo investors swear by low management, duplex owners by two income streams, single-family holders by stability and appreciation. They're all right, and that's the point: there is no universal winner. What rents best is per-strategy and per-city, because each form trades off differently. A condo is low-maintenance but carries a fee and sits in the middle of Ontario's condo-oversupply story; a duplex gives you two income streams and house-hack potential but older-stock repair bills; a single-family leans toward stability and appreciation but fails 100% the month it sits empty. The right form flips by city depending on price-to-rent, the tenant pool, and which forms the local market actually supplies. This guide compares the three the honest way — gross rent versus net after each form's cost profile, and single-tenant versus multi-tenant risk — so you can match the form to your strategy and your city. Figures dated July 2026, CMHC-sourced; market data, not investment advice.