An open standard for rental housing · Edition 1.0

Your building
has a portal.
It's empty.

Operators spend thousands acquiring each new resident, then hand them a key and a login that explains almost nothing about how to live in the building. THRESHOLD is a free, auditable standard for closing that gap — twenty-five lifecycle stages, from the first listing view to the day the file is closed after someone leaves.

If you run buildings

Score your building in ninety seconds

Five questions, an honest estimate, and the six questions that would tell you exactly. No email required; your answers stay in your browser.

Start the short score →
If you're moving in

Build your own move-in checklist

Everything your building should have told you, sequenced by date. Ontario rules, real lead times, and the things that go wrong if you leave them late.

Generate a checklist →
If you live in Ottawa

Find out who actually collects your recycling

It changed on 1 January 2026, and it isn't the City any more. For some buildings it changed again. Most handbooks still have it wrong.

Check your building →

The gap, measured

78% / 33%Renters who say convenient services matter, against those who trust their manager to provide themAppFolio, 2026
3.7/5Average resident sentiment at the thirty-day mark — the first point the relationship breaksRetently, 2026
$3.9–7kCost of a single non-renewal, per unit, in make-ready, vacancy and re-leasingIndustry range, 2025–26
~80%Of inbound questions to property managers are repetitive and proceduralHaven.ai, 2026

What the standard says

Three principles govern everything else, and each of them is a claim that existing practice gets wrong.

Timing is part of the requirement

Information delivered at the wrong moment is functionally undelivered. A forty-page handbook issued at lease signing satisfies nothing — it arrives when the resident cannot act on it, and it is unfindable when they can.

Mode is part of the requirement

A waste-sorting rule sent by email is not a delivered waste-sorting rule. It has to exist at the waste room door, at the moment of the decision, in front of someone holding a takeout container and three identical bins.

Currency is part of the requirement

Wrong information is worse than absent information, because it creates reliance and reliance creates liability. Every item carries a source and a review date, and an item past its review date scores zero — not partial credit.

The architecture
ElementCountWhat it governs
Lifecycle stages25From first listing view to post-tenancy file closure, in six acts
Information types12What kind of communicative act each item is — which determines its format, mode and review cycle
Delivery modes4Push, pull, ambient, evidenced — where information has to physically be to count as delivered
Requirements71The scored items, across three cumulative conformance levels
Read the standard Read the argument

Recently changed

Rules that make a tenant handbook wrong, logged as they happen. If your building's information hasn't been reviewed since these dates, it is out of date.

Latest entries — the change log
1 January 2026 · OttawaThe City stopped collecting residential recycling

Blue box collection moved to the provincial producer-run program, administered by Circular Materials and collected by Miller Waste. The accepted materials list changed at the same time.

1 January 2026 · OttawaNewer multi-residential buildings excluded until 2031

Buildings of six or more units ready for occupancy from 2026 onward are not eligible for the provincial program and need a private recycling contract to receive City garbage collection at all.

2024 onward · OttawaGreen bin participation became a condition of City collection

Multi-residential properties must participate in the organics program to receive waste collection services from the City.

See the full change log
Why this is free

A standard nobody can read is a sales gimmick. BuildingThreshold publishes the THRESHOLD standard and its self-assessment openly and ungated, and they will stay that way. CIONAOD Inc. sells verification and production services to operators who want help closing the gap — but the standard is useful without them, and it is meant to be. More about that here.