Know your building before you sign.
Rent Wise TO is an open-data rental intelligence platform for the Greater Toronto Area. We map every registered apartment building, score it 1–10 for livability using the City's own inspection record, and put the maintenance history, open enforcement cases and resident reviews in one place — free, before you tour, apply or sign.
Why we built it
A rental listing tells you the price, the square footage and how the unit looked on the day the photos were taken. It doesn't tell you the elevator has been out of service twice this year, that the building failed its last pest inspection, or that the same management company runs eleven other buildings with open property-standards cases.
The City of Toronto already collects all of that and publishes it. It's just spread across spreadsheets that nobody reads while they're apartment hunting. Rent Wise TO makes the public record legible, mapped and searchable — so renters walk into a viewing with the same information the landlord already has.
How it works
- 1We ingest the City's open data nightly
Automated syncs pull the latest RentSafeTO evaluations, building registry and Municipal Licensing investigations directly from the City's data portal.
- 2We score every building 1–10
Weighted inspection categories plus active enforcement cases produce a single livability score, colour-coded on the map from deep red (worst) to green (best).
- 3We map it to a neighbourhood
Every building is placed inside the City's official 158-neighbourhood boundaries, so you can compare places, not just addresses.
- 4We add the human layer
Street View imagery, category-by-category inspection breakdowns, the text of open cases, and resident reviews pulled from the open web.
Who it helps
Compare buildings on maintenance, not marketing. See the inspection history and what neighbours actually say before you commit to a year.
Track problem portfolios across a management company, a neighbourhood or the whole city, with the source records one click away.
A building-quality signal that sits beside price and photos — the trust layer rental marketplaces are missing.
Where the data comes from
- RentSafeTO: Apartment Building Evaluations
City inspectors grade every registered rental building of 3+ storeys and 10+ units across ~20 categories — entrance doors, elevators, stairwells, garbage, pests, parking, security.
- RentSafeTO: Apartment Building Registry
Owner and property-management contacts, unit counts, year built and amenities for every registered building.
- Municipal Licensing & Standards: Investigation Activity
Open and recently closed property-standards investigations, including the specific deficiencies an inspector recorded.
- City of Toronto Neighbourhood Boundaries
The official 158-neighbourhood geography used to map buildings, scores and cases to a place.
- Public web reviews
Resident commentary surfaced from the open web (Google, Reddit and forums) alongside the official record — clearly labelled as opinion, not city data.
City datasets are published by the City of Toronto under the Open Government Licence – Toronto. Rent Wise TO is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the City of Toronto.
Common questions
Each building starts from its most recent RentSafeTO evaluation. Category scores are weighted — the things that affect daily life and safety (elevators, entrance security, pests, heating, stairwells) count more than cosmetic items. Open Municipal Licensing investigations pull the score down, and the result is normalised to a 1–10 scale where 10 is the best-maintained buildings in the city.
Every building, score, unit count and open case on Rent Wise TO comes from published City of Toronto open data. Nothing is simulated. Data refreshes automatically every night from the City's CKAN feeds.
Scores follow the City record. If the City re-inspects and the evaluation improves, the score moves at the next nightly refresh. We also accept documented corrections for building metadata.
Renters comparing buildings, tenant advocates and legal clinics tracking problem portfolios, journalists and researchers, and listing platforms that want a building-quality signal beside their price and photos.