The landlord toolkit for 2026: tenant screening, AI reference checks, and the Alberta opportunity
SingleKey’s Mackenzie Wilson breaks down what every Canadian landlord needs to know right now — and shares product features that haven’t even launched yet.
Recorded: April 2026
Host: Erwin Szeto, The Truth About Real Estate Investing for Canadians Podcast
Guest: Mackenzie Wilson
Before we get into this week’s episode, I want to share something that stuck with me.
My family attended a talk last week by Shannon Lee Simmons — CFP, bestselling author of Making Bank, and founder of the New School of Finance. The talk was put on by EO Toronto and I brought my kids. Shannon shared that many of the teenagers she works with have already given up on their financial futures. Housing feels unaffordable. Jobs are hard to find. The confidence just isn’t there.
That hit hard. But Cherry and I aren’t waiting for anyone to fix this for our kids. Our son is already working at our events earning a real wage. Our daughter starts bookkeeping for us this summer. They’re learning money, learning job skills — and yes, Dad gets a tax deduction. The point is: you fight financial despair with action, not sympathy.
Shannon also noted that because the future feels bleak, young people aren’t investing — they’re speculating. Sports betting, high-risk crypto, gambling. The casino didn’t get big by making people wealthy. The answer hasn’t changed: repeatable, boring, proven investing. That’s why this podcast exists.
Which brings me to this week’s guest.
Who is Mackenzie Wilson?
Mackenzie Wilson is Head of Business Development at SingleKey — Canada’s leading tenant screening and landlord risk management platform. He’s also an active real estate investor in Calgary, founder of the Alberta Landlord Community (5,000+ members, the largest landlord-only Facebook group in the province), and co-owner of Everway Legal Support, an eviction and process serving business operating across Canada.
We covered a lot of ground — here are the highlights.
What’s happening in Alberta right now
Alberta has been a darling of Canadian real estate investors for good reason: no rent control, business-friendly legislation, and strong population growth. But the picture is getting more nuanced.
Mackenzie shared that new build starts have been strong across the province — but CMHC’s MLI Select lending requirements have tightened significantly. Projects that started two years ago are finishing now with different rules than they were underwritten under. Developers are being asked to put in an additional $50,000 to $150,000 per deal at closing. And with rents coming in below original projections, some of those developers are becoming motivated sellers.
My take: rather than starting a development from scratch, it may make more sense to buy a distressed MLI Select project from a motivated seller — at a discount — than to go through the full development process yourself. The hard work is already done.
Calgary is also facing a new wrinkle: the city is reversing its blanket rezoning policy, making it harder to get permits on missing middle infill development. Mackenzie pointed out that even under the old blanket zoning, only about 15–25% of available properties actually pencilled out once you applied all the real constraints — lot size, setbacks, square footage minimums, and economics. The political backlash against densification is real, but the actual impact on supply is often misunderstood.
ATB’s latest GDP forecast for Alberta was revised upward — partly because of elevated global oil prices tied to the Strait of Hormuz situation. If you’re invested in Alberta real estate or Canadian energy, that’s a tailwind worth watching.
The SingleKey product suite — what landlords actually need
If you’re a landlord in Canada and you’re not using some form of tenant screening software, you’re taking on unnecessary risk. Mackenzie walked through everything SingleKey offers:
Tenant screening
SingleKey connects directly with Equifax and TransUnion for credit checks, searches the RCMP serious offender and sex offender database, pulls eviction data from provinces that make it available online, and cross-references with OpenRoom — a crowdsourced eviction database where landlords upload their LTB judgments. Everything runs from one application. No re-entering data, no manual credit check requests.
One feature I particularly like: SingleKey generates a shareable QR code for each rental listing. A serious tenant can scan it at the showing and complete the full application on their phone in the living room. The days of paper clipboards aren’t missed.
Tenant insurance
SingleKey can send a tenant an insurance invite at any point — new tenancy, existing tenancy, month-to-month. If the tenant uses SingleKey’s provider (through Walnut), you can mandate a minimum $2 million liability policy that the tenant cannot remove. And critically: if that policy is ever cancelled, you get automatically notified. You won’t know why — privacy prevents that — but you’ll know it happened, and you can get ahead of it before things go sideways.
Rent collection
Both pre-authorized debit (automated pull, slower — up to five to seven business days) and interactive e-transfer (faster, tenant-initiated) are available. Pros and cons to each, but both reduce the friction of chasing rent every month.
Digital lease signing
Now available across Canada (except Quebec and Nova Scotia, which require government-issued leases). You can embed conditions directly into the signing flow — including making tenant insurance a mandatory step before the tenant can sign the lease. That’s a powerful way to set the right foundation from day one.
The biggest new feature: AI-powered automated reference checks
This was the highlight of the episode — and we did a live demo on the show.
Mackenzie shared a stat that floored me: in a survey of landlords, 76% said they receive reference check calls from other landlords less than 10% of the time. I’ve always called references on every single tenant. Mackenzie does too. We’re apparently in the 1%.
The reason most landlords don’t do it: it’s awkward, time-consuming, and doesn’t scale. Getting through to someone, leaving voicemails, following up — it can eat 40 minutes of your day per application. Multiply that across multiple applicants and it’s a real problem.
SingleKey has been running an AI voice agent that automates this entire process. After 400 test calls, it’s achieving an 88% completion rate on full reference interviews. The agent calls the previous landlord, asks a structured set of open-ended questions — lease term, rental amount, payment history, pets, lease breaches, criminal record, and the key one: would you rent to this person again? — and delivers a PDF summary plus the full call recording.
The open-ended question format matters. If you just ask “was this a good tenant?”, you’re cueing up a yes/no that a fake reference can easily fake. When you ask “what was the rental amount?”, “when exactly did the tenancy start and end?”, and “can you describe the pets?” — you’re requiring the reference to have actual knowledge of the tenancy. A fake reference usually doesn’t.
We actually ran a live demo during the episode. I answered as a previous landlord for a fictional tenant named “John Tennant” at 123 Sesame Street, Edmonton, Alberta. The AI handled an incomplete address, asked follow-up questions, adapted to my answers in real time, and wrapped up the full interview in under two minutes. It was genuinely impressive.
Mackenzie’s point on the broader picture: this isn’t automating a job someone was doing — 76% of landlords weren’t doing it at all. This is adding a layer of due diligence that simply didn’t exist before, at a cost and time commitment that makes it viable at scale.
Vacancy rates and what they mean for Ontario landlords
Vacancy rates are rising across Ontario. Mackenzie noted they’re being reported at around 5% in some markets, and likely higher given data lag. Part of the reason: properties that were listed for sale are now coming back onto the rental market as sellers can’t find buyers at the prices they need. More rental supply means more competition for tenants — which is good for renters and harder for landlords.
For Ontario landlords specifically, the lesson is clear: tenant quality matters more than ever. A vacant unit is painful. A bad tenant in Ontario — where LTB timelines can stretch six months or more — is potentially catastrophic. Tools like SingleKey aren’t a nice-to-have anymore. They’re part of operating responsibly.
Bottom line
Canadian real estate is getting more complex. CMHC is tighter. Rents are softer in some markets. Vacancy is rising in Ontario. And fraudulent rental applications are getting easier to fake with AI tools — which makes verified, third-party screening even more important.
SingleKey’s suite — credit checks, eviction searches, insurance, digital leases, rent collection, and now automated AI reference checks — is the most comprehensive landlord toolkit I’ve seen in Canada. If you own rental properties, there’s no reason not to have a free account.
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To Listen:
Audible: https://www.audible.ca/pd/B0GXW87LXN?source_code=ASSGB149080119000H&share_location=pdp
YouTube: https://youtu.be/fcsdT3DM7XI
You’ve Built Wealth. Now It’s Time to Understand It.
You’ve Built Wealth. Now It’s Time to Understand It.
After dozens of consultations, I’ve noticed the same pattern again and again: most investors have built real wealth, but they’re not confident they can retire from it. They’re sitting on $2M–$5M in property but feel cash-flow poor. They’re paying more tax than they should because everything is held in personal names. They have no liquidity, no insurance strategy, and no clear plan for what happens if something happens to them. And almost every single client tells me the same thing: “I don’t actually know what retirement looks like for us.”
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Final Thoughts
Whether you’re building wealth, protecting it, or preparing to transition it, you deserve a clear, tax-smart strategy that works in real life.
That’s what iWIN Wealth Planning is here for.
This is how we’re creating predictable, stress-free wealth for Canadian families…
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Sponsored by… Me!
This episode isn’t sponsored—except by my wife Cherry and me. Real estate investing is our life. It’s helped us build wealth and achieve peace of mind about retirement and our children’s future.
Till next time—just do it. I believe in you.
Erwin Szeto
W: erwinszeto.com
FB: facebook.com/erwin.szeto
IG: @erwinszeto
Disclaimer
As a committed advocate for transparent and responsible investing, I want to disclose that I am an Advisor to SHARE SFR (Single Family Rental). I hold equity in the company and earn referral commissions from clients I refer.
My endorsement of their model—focusing on positive cash flow and direct ownership—is based on personal experience and belief. Still, every investor should do their own due diligence.
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