Over 50% Of Screened Applications Fraudulent
Toronto realtor with Right at Home Realty Shay Asnani says he has seen a significant increase in fraudulent applications, “particularly over the past year.”
We’re at a really nuanced point in the Toronto area’s rental market. The market continues to be exorbitant, but it’s definitely cooling.
Still, that hasn’t put an end to the complications arising due to the fact that it’s a tough market for renters to break into — even if rents are continually coming down.
According to a figure provided to STOREYS by Menkes Developments, around 50% of rental applications in the last six months have been fraudulent in some capacity.
Director of Menkes Rental Suites Management, Kimberly Sears, further tells STOREYS that the company has screened “over 175 offers to lease” over a six-month course, and of those, “over 90 of them were disqualified due to discrepancies found during the screening process.”
“This could be anything from invalid ID cards, fake credit reports, and manipulated employment letters or pay stubs,” Sears says. “Once we find misleading information, a bigger story typically unfolds from there. Our colleagues in the industry have similarly commented on higher-than-normal averages of fraudulent applicants.”
Toronto realtor with Right at Home Realty Shay Asnani says he has seen a significant increase in fraudulent applications, “particularly over the past year.”
“People will write down that they live at a particular address, and then the person that they've listed as the owner isn't actually the owner of the address," he says. "It's a friend, or something like that." He adds that, as a rule, he’s always scanned rental applications for potential fraud, but that there’s now more of a need than ever before.
“I had a particularly troubling situation where a couple that had applied to a unit that I had listed for rent in the east end had essentially provided fake job letters, fake references, fake credit reports, and they had listed someone who wasn't the landlord as their landlord,” says Asnani. “I contacted the agent who represented their landlord when they were renting that property and I asked that agent, ‘Hey, how were these tenants?’ She told me that they were still in court with them […] and they were a nightmare to deal with: ‘they're still at the place, they're not paying rent.’”
Meanwhile, Sears attributes this nature of increase in fraudulent rental applications to the fact that, for the third straight year, Toronto has been dubbed the most expensive city in Canada, and she cites the Mercers 2024 cost of living city ranking.
