The 40-year-old Federation of Metro Tenants’ Associations is expanding in hopes of stepping up protections to an exploding new generation of Toronto tenants — condo renters.

The federation has seen a spike in emails and calls to its hotline from renters living in glass-and-granite-clad condos, shocked by demands from their landlords for key deposits of up to $500 or huge rent increases to cover escalating maintenance fee costs.

Condo boards are also a source of concern: Some are demanding that tenants pay a fee, often $150, just to rent the elevator for a move, or $100 an hour for a security guard to oversee the process, says Geordie Dent, executive director of the federation.

Poor-quality construction and the inability to get things fixed — given that the landlord can often live across the country or around the world, and the tenant has no legal right to demand repairs from the condo board — are high among the long list of common complaints, noted Dent.

The federation has already started reaching out to tenants in some downtown skyscrapers dominated by renters, and will launch a webinar on April 15 via its website, torontotenants.org, to kick off the condo-specific advocacy group and get feedback.

Historically, the federation has advocated largely for the rights of apartment tenants. But the explosion of condos being rented out by investors — the numbers have grown 85 per cent between 2006 and 2013 — is posing a very different set of issues, says Dent.

And many of them fall into legal grey zones.

“A lot of the condo tenants contacting us feel they are being treated like second-class citizens or tenants to whom the (Residential Tenancies Act) doesn’t apply,” said Dent.

While condo renters technically have the same legal rights as apartment dwellers, with condos there is often confusion over who is responsible for what. Even simple but critical issues such repairs can be more complicated.

In an apartment building, for instance, the landlord is legally obligated to make sure things are fixed and rowdy tenants are dealt with.

But who is responsible if a water leak spans a number of condo units, especially in a complex where there can be 100 different landlords responsible for 100 different units, plus a board that has no legal relationship — or responsibility — to someone simply renting out the condo?

Adding to tenant headaches is the fact that a condo board’s own rules can conflict with renters’ rights: the Residential Tenancies Act, for instance, limits key deposits to the actual cost of the key or fob. A $500 charge would be illegal, says Dent.

There have been many complaints, he adds, about landlords simply changing the locks at the end of a tenancy and refusing to return key deposits.

There is no doubt that the sheer number of new condos is contributing to the escalating number of complaints: In 2006, there were 41,749 rented condos in the Toronto Census Metropolitan area, according to figures from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. By last year, that number had climbed to 77,255 and continues to grow.

There’s no doubt that such growth has posed huge headaches for condo owners, as well, many of whom have found themselves stuck in what amounts to more of a university residence than a highrise home.

The very system designed to protect those homeowners has actually made it more difficult to organize condo tenants and get a full picture of the issues, says John Bowker, executive assistant to MPP Rosario Marchese, whose Trinity-Spadina riding contains a huge concentration of condos.

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Marchese has been pushing for tenants in new buildings, including condos, to have the same protections as tenants in older rentals. That means rent increases would be limited during their tenancy to annual increases set by the government.

“It’s really hard for us to reach out to these tenants because of the physical barriers,” says Bowker. “You have doormen, there is security. We can’t just go knock on everybody’s door.”