1032 davenport road

Someone converted their Toronto garage into a $2000 per month rental apartment

Toronto's desperately low supply of housing has people getting creative with available land and space. You may have heard about the push for laneway homes and garden suites, but garage apartments are probably a new one on your radar.

One particularly odd rental proves just how far homeowners are going to make space for lucrative apartments by converting a house's garage into a rental unit. And not a cheap one, either.

You could live in the literal garage of this two-storey house at 1032 Davenport Road for $1,800 per month, only because nobody seemed willing to rent the thing at its previous list price of $2,000.

The average cost of a one-bedroom unit in the city sits at $2,008 as of July, but someone genuinely thought that a converted garage would fetch the citywide average.

Despite a decent-looking interior and attempts to spice up the listing with fanciful descriptions like "Bright + Airy Space With Mid Century Charm Meets Modern West Coast Living," the unit remains available through late July.

The apartment is hilariously described as a "1 Bedroom Concept Unit With Retractable Wall" that "Features Indoor Living And Outdoor Space."

Buddy, it's a garage door. Because the unit is a garage.

Calling a garage door a retractable wall is some next-level marketing misdirection, but people aren't having it.

One commenter wonders how this converted garage door handles the temperature extremes of a harsh Toronto winter.

The listing suggests that renters "Jump On This Before Its [sic] Snatched Up," but it appears that the unit has been on the market for almost three months now and was only recently re-listed at $1,800 after failing to attract a tenant at the original price of $2,000.

Ukrainian-Canadian author and TikToker Jane Palash tells blogTO she "was browsing Zillow, noticing how some units get progressively more and more absurd, with 300sqf studios going for $2300/month without utilities, how developers get away with calling a glass fishbowl a bedroom, how half a wall is generously named 'junior one bed.'"

"I've seen beds pressed against the doors, coin laundry called 'convenient,' and a place [north of highway] 401 titled 'not too far from the downtown area.'"

"So I thought I've seen it all and more when I found it, the season's diamond: a converted garage. No proper amenities, a makeshift kitchen, and an actual, barely insulated garage door with frosted glass. The beauty of it was the audacity of the landlord or realtor who called this hobbit's hole a 'retractable wall feature.'"

The video has also gained traction on Twitter. The account that cross-posted the original video tells blogTO that "this speaks to the housing scarcity in Toronto and the need for more rental housing."

"The media and government speak about the housing crisis as affecting home ownership, yet rarely are we addressing the rental housing crisis."

"In some buildings, there are bidding wars just to rent a unit. People are struggling so much to find rental housing, and we simply don't have enough. The government turned its back on incentivizing purpose-built rentals decades ago," says the Twitter user.

"I believe this person turning their garage into a rental speaks to the dire need for housing, and it also speaks to the fact that our zoning is so messed up that we can't build anything but detached homes on two-thirds of the land."

In a testament to just how much rents have gone up in recent years, the house itself was renting for a cool $2,700 back in 2017. Now you can get just the garage for about two-thirds of that price.

If the rent seems too high, there is another option: You could buy the entire house, garage and all, for $1,750,000.

Lead photo by

Alexander Croney


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