'I have never seen anything like this before': on the apartment hunt in Greater Sudbury

Leah Miller looks at her watch as she juggles a fistful of keys, standing outside a locked door on a cold northern Ontario evening.

This is the first of five rental property open houses she is holding in the next couple of hours for property management company the Jordan Group. 

"I just open up the unit, turn the lights all on, show the place around," says Miller, a travel agent who picked up showing apartments as a side hustle during the pandemic. 

"So I'm the Vanna White here." 

This first place is a one-bedroom house, that's more of a cabin-in-the-woods, down in the southern reaches of Greater Sudbury, near Richard Lake.

It's $1,395 a month plus utilities, which is within budget for the only person to come out to look at it on this cold night.

"Rental properties are very scarce and if they do come up, they are very expensive," said Paul Recollet, who currently lives in an off-grid home down the Killarney highway and has a long commute every morning to his job in the French River area.

"It's very hard to find affordable housing that's not in a ghetto. It's really all about convenience for me."

After a quick tour and answering a few of Recollet's questions, Miller is off in the car to the next open house and waits for 10 minutes to see if anyone shows up, before locking the door again and jetting off across the city to the next place.

"I've had nights where there's people lined up around the house to get in, but some nights I'll have nobody show up," she said. 

While she doesn't go through a prospective tenant's application, Miller says she does frequently hear from people who are having a hard time finding a rental unit they can afford and sees the same people week after week.

"I hear it all the time. 'I'm sleeping in my car'... Unfortunately I could have 100 people look at the property and only one of them works," she said. 

"It's about credit. Everyone's hurting. But I do see the prices starting to come down."

Sherry Jordan, the property manager behind the Jordan Group, looks after some 300 rental properties in Greater Sudbury for about 50 different landlords, most of them from the Toronto area.

She's been in the business for 25 years, but she says southern Ontario landlords have really taken an interest in Sudbury and the rest of the north since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"The best part about Sudbury and many areas of the north is that the cost of real estate is low and the rents are high. And they're not going to find that in the GTA," said Jordan.

"I have never seen anything like this before. Because the market does fluctuate, but it's stayed high. So I don't think it's going down to the wonderful pricing that we used to have."

Jordan says with cases before the Ontario Landlord and Tenant Board taking up to a year to be settled, landlords are more focused than ever on picking the right tenant. 

"They hire me because they've chosen bad tenants and because 99 per cent of the time, my company gets it right when we choose a tenant," Jordan said.

"But I tell my clients, I don't have a crystal ball."

She says that involves "everything the Ontario government will allow us to do," including checking credit scores, bank statements, pay stubs, landlord references and "sometimes" looking prospective tenants up on Facebook and even driving by some of their past addresses.

Morning North11:07Housing crisis in northern Ontario - the rental market

For our weekly look at the housing crisis in northern Ontario, CBC producer Erik White takes us apartment hunting. He went to see five apartments in one night and spoke with potential renters and a representative from a property management company that finds tenants for landlords.

Jane Bujold is a 58-year-old retailer worker, who lives with her dog in what she describes as "the smallest apartment in Sudbury."

She's looking for another place and is willing to go up to $1,300 per month rent, saying "sometimes you have to pay that just to move."

"If you want a nice place, like in an apartment building, you're going to pay," she said.

But Bujold says her apartment hunt is being made worse by the delays she sees in hearing back from landlords after filing an application. 

"Nobody gets back to for like a week or so. So that screws us right there for time to give proper notice," Bujold said.