What Renting Looks Like in 2035
The children who will rent from you in ten years are in grade four right now. What we build between then and now is what they will inherit.
A Tuesday in March, 2035
Let me show you the destination first, and then we can argue about how likely it is.
Priya is twenty-two. She is finishing a contract in Halifax and moving to Calgary for a job that starts in five weeks. She has never met a landlord in person in her life.
She finds a listing on a Tuesday evening. Before she messages anyone, her device confirms two things automatically: the person advertising the unit is verified, and they hold the legal authority to lease that address. This takes under a second and she barely registers it happening — the same way you no longer notice the padlock icon on a banking website.
She sends her rental record. Not documents. Not a stack of PDFs she has assembled and worried over. A verified record she owns and carries: forty-one months of on-time payments across three tenancies in two provinces, identity confirmed, condition reports at each move-out, one late payment in 2033 with the documented reason attached.
She chooses what to share. Income range, not her employer's name. Payment history, not her bank balance. The landlord receives what the decision requires and nothing more.
The landlord — a woman in Calgary with nine units, or possibly an operator in Singapore who has never seen the building — runs it against published criteria. Priya lands in Band 1. She receives a decision in under an hour, with a note naming the criteria that were met.
She signs on Thursday. The lease writes itself into her record. Her rent reports automatically, so the Calgary tenancy continues building the same file she has been growing since she was nineteen.
In 2035, Priya has never been asked for a co-signer. She would not understand the request.
Nothing in that scenario requires a technology that does not already exist. Every component is running somewhere in the world right now.
What is missing is not invention. It is connection, standards, and enough landlords keeping real records that a portable one becomes possible.
Which is the point of this chapter. That future is not something that will be handed to the rental market by a technology company. It gets built, or not built, by the ordinary decisions of several million landlords over the next decade — including yours.
Generation Alpha Arrives
The oldest members of Generation Alpha — born around 2013 — turn twenty-two in 2035. They will be signing leases. Many will sign their first at nineteen or twenty, which puts the leading edge of them in your applicant pool by 2032.
That is closer than it sounds. It is roughly two tenancy cycles away.
This generation is genuinely different from the five described in Chapter 3, and not in the way people usually mean when they say that about the young.
Every answer they have received since infancy came through a system that selected it
They grew up with generated images, voices and video as ordinary
Their entire lives have been authenticated in the background
Depending entirely on what we build now
The second row is the one I want landlords to sit with, because it inverts an assumption most of us hold.
We tend to think younger people are more vulnerable to digital deception. For Gen Z that has been true, and Chapter 3 gave the numbers. But Generation Alpha is being raised in a world where synthetic media is unremarkable, and the evidence from every previous technology shift suggests that the generation raised inside a deception develops immunity to it faster than the generations who encountered it as adults.
They will not trust their eyes. They will trust the system that verified it.
Which means the landlord who cannot demonstrate verification will not merely seem old-fashioned to them. They will seem unsafe.
Six Shifts Between Now and 2035
Here is what I expect to change, ordered roughly by how confident I am. I will mark clearly where I am forecasting rather than describing.
Financial data becomes portable by default
Canada's consumer-driven banking framework is being built now. Once it matures, a person will be able to grant access to verified financial facts as easily as sharing a document — and revoke it as easily.
The screening industry gets rebuilt on top of this. Income verification stops being a document exercise and becomes a permission. The pay stub, as a tool of tenant screening, has perhaps five years left.
Rent reporting becomes normal, then expected
The direction is already clear. Rental tradelines reach the bureaus. CMHC guidance already asks mortgage applicants for rent history. Lenders are increasingly interested in it.
The path from here is familiar: a differentiator becomes an expectation becomes a baseline. I expect that by the early 2030s, a landlord who does not offer rent reporting will be at a real disadvantage in attracting the applicants they most want — in the same way that a landlord who cannot accept e-transfer is already at a disadvantage today.
The portable rental record arrives
This is the big one, and the one I am least certain about — not because it is technically hard, but because it requires cooperation between parties who currently have no reason to cooperate.
The model is the patient chart. Your medical records follow you between hospitals because the system decided that portability serves everyone. Rental history could work the same way: identity verified once, payment history accumulating across tenancies, condition reports attached, owned by the renter and shared at their discretion.
The obstacle is not technology. It is that no single landlord's records are worth much on their own, so the value only appears once many landlords keep good ones. That is a coordination problem, and coordination problems get solved slowly or all at once.
Fraud gets better before defence does
I would like to be more optimistic here and I do not think the evidence supports it.
Generated documents, voices and video will continue improving faster than the average landlord's ability to detect them, because the attacker only has to be convincing while the defender has to be systematic. Chapter 2 traced this pattern across thirty years and I see nothing that breaks it.
What changes is that the defence becomes cheaper and more available too. The gap between a landlord who verifies at source and one who trusts appearances will widen dramatically — which is another way of saying that the cost of not having a system goes up every year.
Landlording becomes genuinely borderless
A property owner in Hong Kong, Manila or London will be able to verify a tenant's identity, execute a lease, collect rent, hold a compliance record and manage maintenance for a house in Surrey without boarding a plane — with a local contractor network handling the physical work.
Much of this is possible today. What changes is that it becomes ordinary rather than exceptional, which shifts who owns Canadian rental property and how it is managed.
I am ambivalent about this one, and I will say so. Remote ownership done well is efficient. Remote ownership done badly is how buildings deteriorate while nobody who cares is standing in the hallway. The property record from Chapter 5 becomes considerably more important in that world, because it is the only thing that distinguishes the two.
Both sides arrive with AI representation
Renters will use AI assistants to search, compare, draft questions and flag unfavourable lease terms. Landlords will use them to summarize files and draft communications. Some of the negotiation may happen between two systems before either human reads anything.
This sounds dystopian and I am not sure it is. An assistant that reads a lease properly and tells a twenty-two-year-old which clause is unenforceable in her province is doing something useful that she could not otherwise afford.
But it raises a question this book has already answered in a smaller form: if a decision is made or shaped by a system, who explains it? Chapter 7's rule holds and becomes more important, not less. You own the reasoning. "The software said no" will be an even worse defence in 2035 than it is today.
What Should Not Change
A forward-looking chapter that only lists new capabilities is a sales brochure. So let me be equally clear about what I hope survives.
Human discretion. A fully automated tenant decision, made by a system nobody can interrogate, would be worse than the flawed human judgement it replaced. The bands in Chapter 7 exist so a person makes the call with evidence — not so a machine makes it without one.
Proportionate data. The portable record is only good if the renter owns it and shares selectively. A version where every landlord sees everything about everyone is not progress. It is surveillance with better branding, and it will be built by default unless people insist otherwise.
The second chance. A permanent, portable record of every tenancy could easily become a system where one bad year at twenty-four follows someone until they are forty. Credit reporting solved this imperfectly with time limits and dispute rights. Rental records will need the same, and the industry will not add them voluntarily.
That third one troubles me most, and I want to be honest that the framework in this book contributes to the risk as well as to the benefit.
Everything I have argued for — verified records, portable history, accumulated evidence — makes reliability legible. It also makes failure legible. A young person who loses a job, has a terrible year, and misses four payments will carry that in a way their grandparents never did.
I still believe the trade is worth making, because the alternative is what we have now: a market where nobody can prove anything, so everyone is treated as a suspect and the honest are punished hardest. But a system that remembers everything forever is not the goal. The goal is a system that remembers accurately, for a reasonable period, with a way to correct and a way to recover.
If you are ever consulted on how these systems should be built — and landlords will be, because we are the ones supplying the data — argue for the time limits. We will all have a bad year eventually.
The Smart Landlord of the New World
So what does the landlord who thrives in that decade actually look like? Not the biggest portfolio, and not the most technical. Six characteristics, and every one of them is available to a reader with a single basement suite.
- They operate a system rather than a series of hunches. The same steps, in the same order, for everyone — so their decisions are consistent, fast, and defensible.
- They verify before value moves. Identity first, always, in both directions. They are also easy to verify themselves, and they have noticed that the applicants who ask are the ones worth having.
- They can show the proof for every step. Not because they expect a dispute, but because a file that can be shown is a file that ends disputes before they start.
- They compete on certainty rather than speed. In a market where fraud is cheap and vacancy is high, the landlord who is reliably right beats the one who is quickly wrong.
- They treat retention as the primary profit lever. They know what a vacant month costs, they know a good tenant staying two more years is worth more than a slightly higher rent, and they act accordingly.
- They give something back. A verified record, rent reporting, a reference that means something. They understand that a tenant building a future on their property is a tenant who protects it.
"The advantage in the decade ahead does not go to the landlord with the most units. It goes to the one whose word can be checked."
Jimmy Ng · IDEAL FrameworkAnd notice what is absent from that list. Nothing about age, technical skill, portfolio size, or capital. Every one of those six is a choice about how you operate, available to anyone reading this, starting Monday.
Technology at the Kitchen Table
Digital identity wallets — the idea behind the whole future
One concept sits underneath most of this chapter. It has an unhelpful name, as usual, and a simple idea inside it.
What is it, in one sentence? A secure place on your own phone that holds proof of things about you — your identity, your credentials, your history — which you can show to others without handing over the underlying documents.
Why does it exist? Because the current arrangement is backwards. Today, to prove you are over eighteen you show a driver's licence that also reveals your address, birthdate and licence number. To prove you can afford rent, you send bank statements revealing every purchase you made. We over-share constantly because our proofs are bundled into documents.
A wallet unbundles them. It can answer "is this person over eighteen" with yes, without disclosing the birthdate. It can answer "has this person paid rent on time for two years" with yes, without exposing their bank.
What does it replace? The photograph of a passport in a stranger's inbox. The bank statements sent to someone who may or may not own the building. Every anxious over-disclosure the current process demands.
What does it cost? Nothing to the user. Several provinces are already issuing digital identity credentials, and the pattern is spreading.
Why a landlord should want this, and not fear it. It sounds like it gives you less. It gives you more of what actually matters. A verified yes from a trusted issuer is stronger evidence than a document you cannot check — and you no longer hold a file of other people's identity documents, which is a liability you were never paid to carry.
Less data, better proof, lower risk. That combination is rare, and it is the shape of most good infrastructure.
Chapter Twelve Checklist
- Adopt bank-verified income as soon as it is available to you. You are practising for the default state of screening.
- Offer rent reporting now, while it is still a differentiator rather than an expectation.
- Keep real records on every tenancy, including ones already underway. Portable history only becomes possible if enough landlords hold accurate records.
- Give every departing tenant a copy of their own history. Free to you, valuable to them, and it builds the norm.
- Maintain the property record, not just the tenant record. In a more remote market, it is what proves stewardship.
- Keep your criteria written and your decision notes honest. They are what survives automation and what answers "who explains this?"
- Prefer providers that verify and discard over those that warehouse identity documents. That preference will look increasingly wise.
- When you can, argue for time limits and correction rights in any rental record system you are asked about. We will all have a bad year eventually.
- Assume the applicant of 2032 will find "email me a photo of your passport" alarming rather than routine. Plan to be verifiable instead.
- Judge your own operation by the six characteristics in Section 12.5. Every one is a choice, not a resource.
The children who will rent from you in 2035 are in grade four. They will inherit whatever we build — and right now, we are building it by accident.
I have spent this chapter forecasting, which is an unreliable business, so let me end with the part I am actually confident about.
Every generation of this market has been handed its trust infrastructure by the one before it. The settlement-era church groups who walked newcomers to a landlord's door built something and passed it on. The generation that wrote tenancy legislation and standardized forms built something and passed it on. Then we digitized the listing, digitized the payment, digitized the signature — and passed on a gap where the verification should have been.
Generation Alpha will inherit whatever exists in 2035. Not what was intended. Not what was discussed at conferences. What actually exists — which is the accumulated residue of several million ordinary decisions made by landlords who mostly were not thinking about the future at all.
That is the uncomfortable and rather wonderful thing about infrastructure. Nobody builds it deliberately. It is what is left behind when enough people do the same reasonable thing for long enough.
So when you write one line after a phone call, or hand a departing tenant a record of six good years, or verify an identity before money moves, you are not only protecting yourself this month. You are casting a very small vote about what normal looks like in 2035.
Enough of those votes and Priya never gets asked for a co-signer. Not enough, and she starts from zero in Calgary exactly as her grandmother did arriving from Manila in 1979 — with a perfect payment history nobody can see.
I would like the first version. I think it is genuinely achievable, and I think it will be built by landlords rather than for them.
Everything in this book now sits in one place — every checklist, template, scorecard and script, ready to use. That is the next chapter, and then we are done.