If you live in a major Canadian city and want to rent an apartment, what’s the first site you go to? Is there a #1 (and #2 and #3) URL that you’d start with? If not, what would you type into Google (or Yahoo or another search engine of your choice)? I’m strictly interested in your online behaviour. Mind you, if you wouldn’t bother searching online at all, I want to hear that too.
To put my question another way, what’s the Monster.ca of apartment rentals? It’s been seven years since I’ve rented an apartment in Canada. I’m not looking to rent one now–this is for a potential client. I have no sense of who owns the mindshare for this sector, and can’t even think of prominent advertisers. Thanks in advance for your input.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
I almost always go straight to http://vancouver.craigslist.org/apa/, and then to Canada.com’s classifieds.
Craigslist is good for so many things, and apartment hunting is probably at the top of the list.
I look at three main places:
– rentbc.com (found the place I lived in three years ago there)
– Craigslist (found my current place, and my old place in yaletown there)
– Canada.com’s classifieds (found my old place in the west end there, combined with good old fashioned footwork. Nothing like pounding the pavement looking for available apartments…)
I also check out location-specific listings, if I’m looking for something specific — like, when I was looking in Yaletown, I checked with Prompton.. and when I was looking in the West End for a pet friendly place, I checked Bosley’s list of pet friendly buildings.
“city” “apartments” is my Google search. Or at worst “city” “apartments for rent”.
I do exactly what Donna listed above, actually. My last two places I found from rentbc.com.
AMS Rentsline is one that I found useful, it’s aimed at university students, but there is a whole range of places available.
Really nice web interface as well.
I tried online (and print) sources for awhile, but always end up back to the old standby: wearing in the shoe leather. I’ve found a number of fabulous, cheap, character apartments this way, and none of the places I’ve ever ended up renting have bothered to advertise anywhere but their front lawn. Of course, if money isn’t an problem but distance or time is, this isn’t the best solution.
Canada.com in both Ottawa and here. But, here in Vancouver, there seem to be a lot of places that aren’t online anywhere, so walking around in the area you want to live actually works.
Google doesn’t work that well, because many sources of online listings are horribly un-optimized and/or actually invisible to Google (there is no browse, only searches which you can’t bookmark, and hence Google can’t crawl).
Hmmm..just looked at the Vancouver section for Canada.com. It’s as bad as I remembered, but I also saw this link for a “blog”: home chic home — no permalinks, no RSS feed, AND badly written. Boy, those newspaper guys are really good.
FYI, Space4Lease is where to look for commercial space (yes, we’re connected with them, sort of).
I own now, but I previously used Canada.com. However, if I wasn’t looking to rent a condo, I’d probably just walk around the neighbourhood on the last and first days of the month. For rentals in the West End, this is usually the best move.
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