Renting in Montreal

Yes, you can sign a lease remotely. Be sure that the lease you are signing is a lease mandated by the Tribunal administratif de logement (TAL), which is the required lease document in Quebec. You can purchase a “Lease of a Dwelling” from Les Publications du Québec.

Make sure all your responsibilities as a tenant are clear and that anything included in the agreement is written in the lease.

The landlord will often add an appendix and/or list of building regulations. Make sure you read this through carefully.

Video tours can be deceiving and sometimes you're shown a different unit than what you are signing up to rent. In the context of COVID-19, we understand that many will not be able to tour apartments in person. It is best that you do a few virtual visits, and once you're sure of an apartment, then make a single appointment to visit in person, before you sign your lease. Ask questions to clear any doubts you have.

Another good rule of thumb is: if it seems too good to be true, it is. Watch out for any red flags such as the landlord asking for too much information, the apartment being too cheap for the neighbourhood, and weird demands in the contract. Know that if you are unsure, you can ask someone at the Concordia Student Union's Off-Campus Housing and Job Resource Centre (HOJO) to look it over for you to help you make the right decision.

Start with the Concordia Student Union's Off-Campus Housing and Job Resource Centre (HOJO) roommate classifieds. You can also join the 2021-2022 New Concordians Facebook page, where there will be threads about housing and other students looking for roommates throughout the spring and summer. 

There are many platforms you can use to find roommates online. Take a look at classifieds.csu.qc.ca, a Concordia-only apartment and room posting page. Here you can see ads that have been posted by other Concordia students looking for roommates, or individual apartments posted by landlords looking for student tenants. There are also many Facebook groups for international students looking for roommates or housing. Though we aren't affiliated with these groups, we have heard from students that they are also a good resource.

To learn more about the different neighborhoods in Montreal, you can look at our multilingual site likehome.info. This is a website we have created that offers useful information about different aspects of renting an apartment in Montreal and also has an interactive map that displays different neighborhoods with a transit map overlay. There’s a super useful feature on the upper-left side that allows you to select neighborhoods that are within a 20-minute commute to campus. When you click on a specific neighborhood, it gives you a description of the area, the average rent for different sized apartments and the different metro or bus lines that bring you to campus. 

Some neighbourhoods that are farther from campus but might have some more affordable options are: Park Extension, Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, LaSalle, Ville Emard, and Ahuntsic-Cartierville. You can even consider commuting from across the St. Lawrence River, via bus or metro. Longueuil, a suburb across the river, can be reached by metro.

As you expand your search away from campus, keep the public transit map in mind. Living within a 10-minute walk of a metro station will make your commute to campus much easier. Use a map app that includes a transit option to see the distance via transit between an apartment you’re looking at, and the Concordia campus (SGW or Loyola) where most of your in-person activities are expected to take place.

If you’re expecting to have most of your in-person activities at the Loyola Campus, start by looking at neighbourhoods in the western end of Montreal: Verdun, LaSalle, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (NDG), Montreal West.

If you’ll be at the SGW Campus more, consider looking in the areas of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, St-Michel, or in the suburb of Longueuil or Brossard (which connect via metro to downtown Montreal).

Use a map app to determine what the main transit (metro and bus) routes are in the neighbourhoods that you’re looking at, and try to locate housing close to those routes.

It’s very important to know your rights as a tenant in Quebec. Due to the high demand for affordable housing in 2021, there are increased cases of Quebec landlords failing to abide by the usual laws about rent and tenants rights. Standing up for your rights is your responsibility.

Quebec has a rent control system, which is unique in Canada. What does rent control mean for tenants?

1. Your landlord can only legally increase your rent by a certain percentage per year, as determined every year by the Quebec government. In other words, you should not be paying more than a small percentage more than the previous tenants of any apartment. On the Tribunal administratif du logement (TAL) lease (the only legally binding lease document in Quebec), be sure to check “section G,” where the landlord is required to write the lowest rent paid for their rental in the last 12 months. The rent you are being charged can only be a government-approved percentage more than the amount in section G. If a landlord has left section G blank in the lease, you can ask them to provide that information and they are required by law to do so. If the amount in Section G is much lower than what you are being charged, you have 10 days after the section is filled out to request a hearing with Quebec’s rental authority, the Tribunal administratif du logement. By requesting a hearing (which you can do online), you are starting the process of potentially lowering your rent back down to the legally approved level.
2. When you move out, you can pass your lease on to a friend (called a lease transfer, or transfer de bail), without the rent increasing beyond a government-approved percentage, usually between 1 and 3%. You always need to ask your landlord’s permission in writing before assigning a lease transfer to a friend.

Rent control is in place to defend your rights as a tenant, but it’s up to you to make sure your landlord is complying with the rules.

It’s not a good idea to send out multiple applications at the same time. If you send an application for a rental, you are legally bound to sign a lease if your application is accepted. A useful trick is to make your application valid only for a certain time frame, say 48 hours. (You can make a note of this on the application, and inform the landlord when you’re communicating with them.) That way, if you don’t hear back from the landlord within a short period of time, you can keep looking.

Sometimes landlords request money at the time of the application. Be aware that there’s no guarantee that an application fee will either be refunded, or will be credited toward your rent. Send a landlord money online at your own risk.

Remember that within a landlord-tenant dispute, Concordia University will never get involved. A landlord cannot report a tenant to Canada customs, nor to the university, for a matter having to do with housing. They can call the police for matters to do with creating a disturbance or any criminal activity, but anything related to utilities or apartment maintenance is not a police matter.