Why don’t more apartments get built when markets rents rise? Even without rent controls, there are powerful financial incentives that favour building condominiums (where presales generate returns on investments immediately) over rental apartments (where rental income tickles in slowly over decades). Condos have other advantages — property taxes are lower than on rental apartments, and building inspections by individual condo buyers are far less thorough than companies buying entire apartment buildings. There is much more than rent controls to the story.