Urbanation's third-quarter rental report, released October 27, makes a call the firm has avoided for two years: the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area rental market "has entered a recovery phase."[1] Leasing hit records, stabilized vacancy fell, incentives shrank and net rents rose.
Owners elsewhere in Ontario often assume the GTHA's trend reaches them after a lag. So we took Urbanation's five signals and checked each one against the latest data for London and Windsor. The short answer is that the turn hasn't reached southwestern Ontario yet, and the reasons are different enough that waiting for Toronto to lead may be the wrong approach.
Signal 1: Leasing volume
GTHA: New purpose-built rentals absorbed 1,911 units in Q3 and a record 5,092 over nine months, 22% more than in 2025. That kept pace with a record 2,704 completions in the quarter.[1]
London and Windsor: No comparable quarterly absorption series is published for either city. The nearest proxy is jobs. Statistics Canada's September Labour Force Survey shows London employment down 19,500 from a year earlier, with unemployment at 8.4%. Windsor added 11,300 jobs, and its unemployment rate fell to 7.3%.[2]
Read: Toronto's leasing record comes from a large, diverse job base that is absorbing lower rents. London lacks that support right now. Windsor has it, but only recently.
Signal 2: Vacancy
GTHA: Vacancy in stabilized buildings fell for a third straight quarter, to 3.0% from 3.5% a year ago. In buildings at least a year old it fell to 5.8%.[1]
London and Windsor: The latest official reading is still CMHC's October 2025 survey, which put purpose-built vacancy at 4.0% in London (a 15-year high) and 3.7% in Windsor.[3] These measures are not like for like. Urbanation tracks newer GTHA buildings, while CMHC surveys the whole purpose-built stock. Still, neither southwestern Ontario city has a current reading that shows vacancy falling.
Read: CMHC's 2026 survey, due in December, will be the first official test. It will capture a year of record London completions.
Signal 3: Incentives
GTHA: The share of purpose-built projects offering incentives fell to 60% from 67% in a single quarter, the largest drop since 2022. One free month replaced two as the most common offer.[1]
London and Windsor: No published series exists for either city.
Read: This is the gap that matters most for owners and lenders. In a soft market, incentives absorb the weakness before advertised rents do, and they disappear before rents recover. Without a local series, anyone underwriting London or Windsor is flying partly blind on the first signal of a turn.
Signal 4: Rents
GTHA: Same-building purpose-built rents net of incentives rose 0.9% from Q2 and were down 1.5% from a year earlier, the smallest annual decline since 2024.[1]
London and Windsor: Rentals.ca and Urbanation's asking-rent data points the other way.[4] From May to September, average asking rents across all property types:
- Toronto: rose from $2,512 to $2,556 (+1.8%). The one-bedroom annual decline narrowed from 3.9% to 2.3%, and two-bedrooms moved into positive territory (+0.8% y/y).
- London: slipped from $1,917 to $1,897 (-1.0%). The one-bedroom decline barely moved, from 5.0% to 4.7% y/y, and two-bedrooms were down 4.6% y/y.
- Windsor: fell from $1,715 to $1,638 (-4.5%). The one-bedroom decline widened from 5.2% to 12.6% y/y, and two-bedrooms went from a small gain over the summer to -4.7% y/y.
Read: Toronto's annual declines are narrowing. London's are flat, and Windsor's are getting worse, despite that city's job gains. Listings data reflects advertised units, not rents paid by sitting tenants, and is noisy in smaller markets. Still, the five-month direction is consistent.
Signal 5: The supply pipeline
GTHA: This is where Toronto differs most. Condo units under construction fell 38% in a year, to 35,920, the lowest since 2012. Active condo rental listings are down 25% from a year earlier and 43% from their peak.[1] For years, investor-owned condos were a major source of Toronto's rental supply, and that source is shrinking fast. Purpose-built starts hit a multi-decade high but will only replace part of it.
London and Windsor: Neither city relied on investor condos to the same degree, so it doesn't benefit from that pullback. London's pipeline is mostly purpose-built and still growing. CMHC counted 5,857 homes under construction in September (not all of them rentals), against a purpose-built universe of about 49,000 units, and year-to-date starts are up 28%.[5][3] Windsor's starts are down 21% year to date, which should tighten supply there in a few years, not this winter.[5]
Read: Much of Toronto's recovery comes from a supply source drying up. London's main supply source is still delivering.
Why the turn may not travel west
Put the five signals together and the GTHA's recovery looks driven by local conditions rather than a province-wide shift. A deep job market is meeting a sudden drop in condo rental supply. London has the opposite mix on both counts. Windsor has the jobs but not the rent response, possibly because some of its demand loss is from temporary residents, students and workers whose permits were not renewed, which CMHC flagged in its 2025 survey.[3] That kind of demand doesn't come back when the local labour market improves.
None of this means a long slump is coming; lower rents eventually release pent-up household formation. Toronto's recovery is not a forecast for London or Windsor, and treating it as one could lead owners to underwrite rent growth or incentive burn-off earlier than local data supports.
What would change the call
- London's October and November jobs data. The Labour Force Survey for October is due in early November. A stop to London's job losses would be the first precondition for its vacancy to turn.
- The federal 2027 to 2029 Immigration Levels Plan. It is due around November 1. The current plan cuts new temporary-resident arrivals to 370,000 in 2027.[6] Student and work-permit targets matter more for London and Windsor than the headline permanent-resident number.
- CMHC's 2026 Rental Market Survey in December. It will give the first official vacancy readings to compare with Urbanation's GTHA trend.
- Windsor's next two Rentals.ca readings. If the one-bedroom decline doesn't ease as jobs improve, Windsor's weakness is more about demographics than the economy.
The takeaway
The GTHA has turned, and Urbanation's evidence is solid. For southwestern Ontario, the more useful lesson is what turned it: tight supply in investor-owned condos and a job base that held up. Neither is present in London today. Windsor has one of the two. Owners and lenders in both cities should look for the turn in their own local data rather than assume Toronto's will spread west.
This article is for information only and is not investment advice.
Sources
[1] Rental Recovery Begins in the GTHA as Vacancy and Incentives Fall, Q3-2026 rental market results, Urbanation (Oct. 27, 2026): https://www.urbanation.ca/news/rental-recovery-begins-gtha-vacancy-and-incentives-fall
[2] Labour Force Survey, September 2026, Table 7: Labour force characteristics by census metropolitan area, Statistics Canada (Oct. 9, 2026): https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/261009/t007a-eng.htm
[3] Rental Market Report 2025 (London and Windsor CMAs), CMHC (Dec. 11, 2025): https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/professionals/housing-markets-data-and-research/market-reports/rental-market-reports-major-centres
[4] National Rent Reports, May to October 2026 editions (municipal tables, May to September data), Rentals.ca and Urbanation: https://rentals.ca/national-rent-report
[5] Housing starts and construction data for September 2026, CMHC (Oct. 16, 2026): https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/media-newsroom/news-releases/2026/housing-starts-construction-data-september-2026
[6] Immigration Levels Plan briefing material (2026 to 2028 targets), IRCC, House of Commons CIMM committee (Apr. 20, 2026): https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/corporate/transparency/committees/cimm-apr-20-2026/immigration-levels-plan.html