Amanda Goh/Insider
If you want to rent in one of North America's most expensive housing markets, you might have to get comfortable with the idea of sharing a bed with a total stranger.
In a TikTok posted last month, Toronto-based realtor Anya Ettinger highlighted a post on Facebook Marketplace that appeared to show someone offering to rent out half a bed in exchange for 900 Canadian dollars ($650) a month.
"Looking for an easy going female to share the master bedroom and the one Queen-sized bed," the listing read.
"I have been previously sharing the bedroom which only has one queen size with roommate I found on Facebook and it worked out perfectly well!"
The Facebook post was subsequently deleted, but Ettinger's video has racked up over 600,000 views.
She said it's a sign of how bad things have gotten in the supply-starved Toronto rental market, the second-most expensive in Canada, per a June report by the classified advertising site Kijiji.
"Just when you thought the Toronto market couldn't get any worse, it did," Ettinger says in the TikTok video.
"This is so unhinged. Renting out a space in your bed for 900 [Canadian] dollars a month? No wonder so many people hate it here," she adds.
Despite Ettinger's outrage, there are signs that "hot bedding" — sharing a bed with a stranger to save money on rent — is on the rise. A 2021 survey by the University of Technology Sydney polled 7,000 international students living in Sydney and Melbourne and found three percent of respondents had resorted to hot-bedding to save on rent.
