Torontonians have renovation fever, yet one type of city dwelling has been largely overlooked by developers and homeowners: the duplex.

In cities such as Boston, last century’s humble duplexes have been turned into posh condominiums for young families and empty-nesters in the new millennium.

It’s as simple as supply meets demand.

Just as Toronto has, Boston has been hit hard by skyrocketing housing prices that have edged out many middle class (and even upper-middle class) people from the urban real estate market.

And as Toronto is, Boston is littered with early 20th-Century homes that over the years have been converted into two rental units. The units, once refurbished with de rigueur granite countertops, typically afford owners a bit more space and more privacy than they might find in a high-rise tower.

So why hasn’t it caught on here?

“We’re kind of a weird city in that we don’t have it,” said Carolee Orme, a homeowner who has turned her duplex into a condo.

“Toronto’s kind of behind the 8-ball on this, I think.”

Orme bought her house, a pre-converted Victorian duplex near Harbord Village, in 2011 with the intention to live in the bottom unit and rent out the top.

But after being a landlord for a few years, she decided it would be easier in the long run to sell off half her home.

The two-bedroom, two-bath unit, located on 151 Robert Street, is on the market for $949,000.

“I like the security that I get from doing this, knowing that I don’t have to be looking for tenants; I’m not the landlady,” she said.

For many, a condo in a duplex or triplex offers a happy medium between a high-rise and single-family home. Unlike a new high-rise, they have yard access and detached garages, plus a bigger footprint and fewer neighbours for a lower price point.

Boston area realtor Joanna Kirylo said duplex condos have been popular in the Greater Boston Area for well over a decade, and make up a big portion of the city’s housing stock.

“Most of our inventory is a [duplex] condo,” Kirylo said. “We’ve got first-time home-buyers, people moving, downsizing, there’s families living in them.”

But in Toronto, legally converting a building from rental units to condominiums isn’t simple, and takes a lot of time, planning and money upfront.

“I recalled sitting around a table in a lawyer’s office with a lawyer, a surveyor, an engineer and a planner, all of whom I was paying,” said Orme, who estimated construction and the professional fees associated with becoming a legal condominium cost about $50,000.

Orme updated many parts of the house when she first bought it. She brought it up to the fire code and preserved the original Victorian finishings.

But more had to be done in order to make it condo-ready; she had to separate the gas and electricity meters.

“Every inch of the house had to be evaluated to determine whether it belonged to upstairs or downstairs or a common area,” she said.

According to Ontario’s Condominium Act, condo owners must contribute to a reserve fund that covers repairs and replacements of common elements of the building.

That means that in older buildings with lots of expected repairs, condo fees can skyrocket.

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Orme said she was assessed for about $700 a month, almost triple what they cost in Boston.

Kirylo said condo fees usually only cover shared expenses such as insurance, water and sewer, and run about $150-250 a month for a two-bedroom.

Expenses for big shared repairs, such as a new roof or furnace, are divided when the time comes.

This keeps condo fees down, but can lead to big headaches later, said Stephen Marcus, a lawyer who specializes in condo law in Boston.

“If you get one bad owner, it just makes life miserable,” he said.

While the condo board can legally sue an owner for failure to pay their fair share, and put a lien on their property, it’s hard to get a majority vote when things are split 50-50.

“One’s not going to vote to sue oneself,” Marcus said.

In Toronto, high condo fees are enough to dissuade some from trying to convert a rental into a condo.

Dylan Collie, a former architecture student turned amateur developer, hopes one day to convert a duplex into a multi-family condo, but says the condo fees required for the reserve fund make it a tough sell.

Partnering with his brother, he split a single-family in Cabbagetown into a two-unit home for them to live in and the pair is working on converting another single-family into a rental duplex.

Collie estimates he’d have had to charge at least $500 a month in condo fees, if he were to convert the building into condos.

“There’s more things that are going to go wrong, and those things are going to go wrong sooner than later,” he said.

“It would have made it difficult to convince people on the new idea, because it is a new idea here.”

Although he has no intentions of doing the condo conversion with either property, he said he hopes to do so with another building one day, in part, as an experiment in creating more affordable housing in the city.

“I just like it conceptually; it introduces that new model, this new housing type, a hybrid of house and condo,” he said.

“It’s kind of fun and cool.”