After escaping the war in Ukraine earlier this year, Anna Ucankale is planning to make a new life for her and her son in the Newmarket area, but she kept hitting one major roadblock: apartment rentals. While she has now found a place to live, the journey has not been easy.
Ucankale was in Kiev, where all her family lived, when the fighting began. She said it was early in the morning when she and her son heard low-flying planes overhead and then explosions in the distance. They, along with their 16-year-old wiener dog Zhora, quickly got int their car and drove to a bomb shelter at a nearby factory.
They stayed there for three weeks but as the situation got worse, Ucankale realized they couldn't stay much longer.
“At some point, I realized I couldn’t stay like this any longer and it was getting worse and worse and we had to leave,” she said.
Originally she tried to leave by car with her son, Andrei, dog and an elderly aunt, but due to a shortage of gasoline in the city, they ended up abandoning their vehicle on a street and walking to the train station, she said. They waited there for more than 24 hours to board a train. Once on the train, it was cold and dark but she said people were friendly, sharing food, water and blankets.
“People were very close knit and helped each other,” she said.
The train arrived in Lviv, another city in Ukraine closer to the Polish border. They were met by volunteers who were there to help people arriving make their way across the border. Ucankale said she and her son decided to stay to help for a while before making the trip themselves.
After some time they ended up in Warsaw, Poland and began getting their documents together to come to Canada. Ucankale said she immediately began looking for work in Canada and came across a Facebook ad for a job at a Russian language school in Newmarket. That's when her first search for a place to stay in Newmarket began.
Ucankale and her son arrived in May. Through some connections with Ukrainians in Newmarket and volunteer networks here, they were able to stay with Marion Warburton, who had heard about the family in need through an announcement made at her church.
"I am very grateful to Marion and to the woman who introduced us for the opportunity to take a breath and calm down from the hostilities,” Ucankale said.
She said she doesn't know how to even thank Warburton for everything she has done and how she has helped her over these past few months.
During that time, she has been working at the Russian language school and Andrei has been working at Bikesports on Main Street. Now that she has been earning money for a few months and settling in, she was ready to find a place of her own. While she has loved staying with Warburton, the space there isn't a private suite.
However, the hunt to find an apartment was off to a very rocky start. Ucankale said that despite looking at countless listings and apartments in Newmarket and the surrounding area, she was always passed over because she doesn't have a credit history here.
"I have money, I can rent, I can pay for a few months for an apartment,” she said. "We are educated people. We are decent people. I don’t understand how such a situation has developed."
The rental market has become increasingly competitive over the past few years, according to local real estate Danyelle Cullum. She is an agent with Keller Williams and has worked on a lot of rental listings from both the landlord and renter side.
"We were seeing things like bidding wars and offer days on rentals," she said.
The rental market is challenging enough for people who have a stable income, good credit history, and enough money for a deposit, according to Cullum. If someone doesn't meet one of that criteria, it would be even harder.
"It would almost be, for lack of a better word, impossible for a person with either no credit or inability to prove credit," she said.
With the added demand for apartments and rentals outpacing the available supply, she said if a tenant didn't have everything the landlord was looking for, they would just be overlooked for the next lineup of potential renters.
"I've had clients who have been working on their credit score and building their credit score and landlords simply just will not look at them. They won't reconsider their application," Cullum said. "It makes me sad that I have to tell them that unfortunately I can't work with you because there's simply nothing that I could do. No negotiation or no conversation that I could have would make a landlord change their mind when they have 30 other people potentially interested in that property."
Her advice to people in that situation is to go to Facebook groups and try to connect with landlords one-on-one instead of using a realtor. However, she does still advise that once you are in a position to sign a lease, you get a realtor to look over it and make sure everything is OK.
Fortunately, for Ucankale, she was finally able to find an apartment with the help of her real estate agent and will be moving out of Warburton's place next week.
"We found a wonderful place. The owners were very helpful when they found out we were from the Ukraine," she said. "They are Canadian people with a big heart. We meet amazing Canadian people every day."
She said she wants to stay in Canada long term and make a life here. She wants to learn English and then do what she needs to do to become a licensed psychologist here, as that's what she had been doing in Ukraine.
She said she hopes Andrei will get into the trades, potentially as an electrician. All this, she said, wouldn't happen without them finding accommodation.
