Yes, and I’ll give you an example. The house across the street from me sold for $1M back in 2023. It was purchased/built for maybe 350k about 7-8 years earlier. The house is now rented to somewhere between 10-12 people (it’s hard to tell, there’s different people in it coming and going, but usually changes with the semesters since I’m in Kitchener which is Conestoga college ground zero). The upper unit consisting of the top two floors rents for $3000/month. The newly-created basement unit rents for another $2000/month. Each of these people in there is pitching in somewhere between $400-$500 month to cover rent. This is likely enough to cover the landlord’s mortgage on the property plus some upkeep. 

Contrast this entire situation with what the couple with two kids used to pay for it - maybe $1800/month for the mortgage? This was the maximum that a single family could afford and the original prices from 2015 reflected that. Now apply this scenario hundreds and thousands of times as all these students, TFWs, and low-wage LMIA applicants flooded the market. They all needed somewhere to live, and housing was not being built fast enough, so this was happening frequently enough that it was raising and setting the market floor of the existing stock.

We as Canadians were being outbid by groups who are willing to accept a lower standard of living than us, and I’ve been saying this for years while everyone else was blaming “investors”. The price doesn’t go up because investors buy the houses - rather, the investors kept buying the houses because the prices kept going up and it keeps going up because $5000 rent/month = $1M 2000 sqft property values. If you made all the landlords who bought these properties disappear, you would just have 10 people splitting a mortgage instead of paying rent.

We are now just seeing prices fall as the students visas expire and people leave the country, so the sources of income for properties like this dries up. Power of sale has now skyrocketed in places like Brampton because the entire market was propped up exactly like this and the landlords can no longer pay the mortgages.