The Big Bang Event of Ontario’s Housing Shortage Crisis
Housing Provider
An in-depth analysis tracing Ontario’s ongoing housing crisis back to the "Big Bang" of rent control policies from the 1970s.
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Immigration, one of the most challenging and life-changing experiences a person can go through. An experience many go through willingly, in the search of a better life and new opportunities that can help them and their families grow and find comfort. On paper,the concept of immigration is frequently romanticized, presented as an incredible journey. That is especially the case in the countries where the people emigrate from - “…and then their lives changed forever and they’re living a happy, good life…” is what you hear often. However, few openly talk about the challenges that come up along the way.
From the actual arduous process of gathering all of the necessary paperwork and qualifying for an immigration opportunity, to going through the application process and spending a very nerve-wrecking few months / years waiting for a decision to finally, figuring out what you’re doing now that you made it to the destination country. In this blog post, we’ll delve into the portion of the journey that focuses on settling in Canada - after the person has completed their application process successfully and been given their long-term stay visa or permanent residence.
We run Immitracker, the largest immigration application tracker in Canada and Australia. Our tool is quite popular for the immigrants who are going through the actual immigration process - on the verge of submitting their documents and waiting on the government’s responses and decision. The entire immigration application process can be quite unpredictable with its changing timelines and requirements. To help immigrants gain a better understanding of how long the application process actually takes for each program and which steps it goes through along the way, Immitracker crowdsources application data anonymously and helps users compare their cases with each other. At this time, Immitracker has hundreds of cases logged for the Canadian ExpressEntry program in 2024 and thousands of cases spread across different programs over the years that often paint a different picture regarding immigration application processing.
As a part of our effort to support immigrants better, we launched a WhatsApp community for both Canada and Australia in 2023. With over 5,000 active members, the community has become a helpful tool for immigrants to gain insights regarding each other’s immigration experience,get questions answered, and share their biggest concerns and frustrations. This community has become our source of information about the day-to-day life of an immigrant actively going through the application and settlement process. It is also what helped us identify the main pain points immigrants experience along the way.
In December 2023, the Immitracker team conducted a survey in the WhatsApp community. The main purpose of the survey was to better understand how immigrants engage with the tools Immitracker offers them and what are the things they need the most help with along their immigration journey. One of the questions asked was: “What information would be most helpful for you at this point of your immigration journey?”.
The top three responses to the question were the following:
These results signify that the top two concerns for most immigrants after successfully completing the immigration application process are:
The Settlement chat we have in our Immitracker Canada community supports this hypothesis. Housing, where to live,and how to find a place to rent are topics that come up regularly as demonstrated by some of the screenshots of conversations below.
While some immigrants are already present in Canada when they’re applying for their visa or permanent residence,many are moving to the country from abroad. They’re only presented with a short period of time to finalize their paperwork after approval and land in the Canada. This makes the waiting for the application approval even more stressful because many steps need to be taken quickly right after, such as: figuring out where to move, finding a place to live, securing a job, and if you have afamily - finding a school for your kids. A foundation in Canada needs to be built from absolute scratch in a time period of under a year with a lack of advance planning for the move. This is coupled with the fact that there’s little to no guidance around where you should move to in the country and how to get set up in the city that you end up selecting.
The Canadian rental market is known to be challenging for many reasons, especially in big, popular cities such as Toronto. High percentages of fraud (fake properties posted, defrauding of people for apartment deposits) and stringent tenant selection criteria (“tripleA tenants” being the main type of desirable candidate for most landlords) are only a couple of examples of the challenges. Immigrants face a high barrier to entry into the Canadian housing market when they lack a Canadian credit score,full-time local employment, and a guarantor. As a result, they might end up paying far more rent in advance (6-12 months) rather than the first and last month officially required to demonstrate that they’re suitable tenants and can afford their rent. The fraud challenges affect both Canadian landlords and tenants, with immigrants being the segment that gets affected even more so.
As a part of our effort to support immigrants, the Immitracker team decided to launch a product dedicated to helping immigrants overcome the housing challenges in Canada. In May, 2024, we launched the first version of ImmiHome - a tool that connects immigrants to services that simplify the Canadian housing journey for them. With partners that can help with the replacement of a guarantor, provide an international credit report, and much more, ImmiHome is the first housing tool that is dedicated to the housing needs of immigrants specifically.
Many companies have now taken on the challenge of improving the housing experience in Canada and ImmiHome is the bridge between these companies doing this incredible work and the immigrants who are in the greatest need of their help. With new companies being added regularly, ImmiHome is an ever-growing solution that includes services carefully vetted by the founders of Immitracker. It is built according to the needs expressed by the immigrants in our community and our hope is that with this solution, we can begin solving one of the biggest pains most immigrants to Canada experience at some point of their immigration journey.
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At Openroom, we love highlighting innovative technology that is helping the world be a better place. Openroom Co-Founder & CEO, Weiting Bollu, met Co-Founder & CEO Nino Melikidze through a mentor. After hearing about the journey, Weiting invited Nino to share more about Immitracker because the rental ecosystem of Canada needs to know the great technology that is out there!
If you have technology that you'd like to share with the Openroom community, feel free to get in touch with us at hello@openroom.ca.
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Nino is a Georgian immigrant based in Toronto with a background in running operations and product development at tech startups. She has lived in over three countries and speaks four languages. Prior to starting work on Immitracker, she was the founder of VisaWire - an employment service marketplace for Canadian immigrants (which later was merged into Immitracker). She is also the host of a podcast called My Immigrant Story which unpacks the challenges immigrant professionals face when it comes to building a successful career in their new home.
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