Note
The rental market lives inside a handful of catchments
In every Ontario city we checked, one or two school attendance boundaries contain a disproportionate share of the rental inventory — from 18% in Toronto to more than half in Vaughan. A renter shopping by catchment has far fewer boundaries to choose from than a buyer.
Toronto has 7,067 active MLS® rentals spread across hundreds of school catchments. The single largest concentration sits inside Jarvis Collegiate Institute's attendance boundary: 1,286 rentals, or 18% of the city's entire rental supply. The next largest, Harbord Collegiate Institute's, holds 659 — 9% of the total. Together, two boundaries contain more than a quarter of all Toronto rentals.
The pattern sharpens outside Toronto. In Vaughan, St. Elizabeth Catholic High School's boundary holds 341 of the city's 658 active rentals — 52% of the entire supply in a single catchment. In Hamilton, Cathedral High School's boundary holds 246 of 625 (39%). In Mississauga, Father Michael Goetz Secondary School's boundary holds 275 of 1,007 (27%). In each case, the largest rental catchment is a secondary school whose boundary covers a high-rise corridor.
Why the concentration matters
For-sale inventory distributes more evenly because detached neighbourhoods generate their own listings. Rental inventory concentrates because apartment buildings concentrate — and apartment buildings sit inside a few large secondary-school catchments, not spread uniformly across a city's elementary boundaries. A family renting inside a specific elementary catchment will often find its supply is a small subset of the large secondary catchment that overlaps it.
The practical consequence: a renter who cares about school catchment has a much narrower set of realistic options than a buyer in the same city. Most elementary boundaries carry fewer than a dozen active rentals, and some carry none. The rental pages on DistrictIQ show every catchment's current count for exactly this reason — a catchment with three active rentals is a catchment where the next vacancy matters.
Per-school rental counts and city totals were read from each city's /rent page on October 13, 2026. Each page resolves rental inventory from the same listing sweep behind the school profiles: active MLS® For-Lease residential listings, each matched to the school's board-published regular-track attendance boundary. Shares were computed by dividing the single-catchment count by the city total. Only the public board (non-Catholic) or largest secondary catchment is quoted as the "single largest" per city, as secondary boundaries tend to be larger than elementary ones and thereby hold more of a city's supply.
- Geography
- Toronto, Mississauga, Oakville, Vaughan, Hamilton
Every figure quoted above was read from a public DistrictIQ page on the date beside it, and each page states its own as-of date. Open the page to see what it reads today.
A Note is one finding, written once. Nothing on this page resolves from current inventory: every figure was read from the DistrictIQ page named beside it, on the date given there, and the wording was fixed on October 13, 2026. Inventory moves and these figures do not, so the live number is always the one on the linked page. Where the two disagree, trust the linked page.
Market figures are derived by DistrictIQ from active TRREB / PropTx MLS® listings and reflect list-price activity (not sold prices) as of the date shown. They are provided for general information only, are not an appraisal, financial or investment advice, and must not be relied upon for any transaction. Information is deemed reliable but not guaranteed.