Photo: Trevor Pritchard/Flickr

If you rent, you understand the acute pain that comes with combing through Craigslist ads at length, only to settle for an apartment that’s barely okay-ish. After year after year of climbing rents, new numbers from the CMHC suggest not exactly relief for renters, but a very slight slowing of year-over-year increases in lease rates.

Between 2013 and 2012, the average rent for a private apartment (not including rental condos) in Toronto went up 2.81 per cent to $1,134 a month (Tweet this). Compare that to between 2011 and 2012, when the rent rose by 3.37 per cent, from $1,067 to $1,103.

Here are a few other things we learned about the Toronto rental market by looking through the CMHC’s numbers:

Overall, the vacancy rate in Toronto proper sits at 1.6 per cent, slightly tighter than the 1.7 per cent rate recorded in 2012.

In Central Toronto, the vacancy rate for rental apartments reached 1.7 per cent in fall 2013, an improvement over the impossibly low rate of 0.8 per cent in 2012 (Tweet this).

Looking back at CMHC stats all the way to 1992, the lowest vacancy rate recorded in the city was in 2000, when it reached a rate of 0.6 per cent (Tweet this).

We looked into neighbourhood numbers as well to see what it’ll cost you to rent a bachelor apartment, a one-bedroom or two-bedroom apartment in different corners of Toronto. While downtown renting has turned into something of a blood sport, the number show that some of the biggest leaps in price were actually in ‘burbs like Central Etobicoke.

See our maps below plus the three biggest price gainers in the city:

Curious about condo rents? We’ll have a new map online early next week. To see how price growth for two-bedroom rental apartments in Toronto have risen over the last ten years, check out our country-wide comparison.