I thought I could cut my monthly rent in half by giving up my place in downtown Toronto for an apartment in São Paulo, Brazil. The savings are possible, in theory. The problem is that short-term residents rarely gain access to local prices, so the way people determine affordability is often wrong.
My Brazilian husband and I are remote workers who can do our jobs from anywhere with an internet connection. We saw the opportunity to spend the winter in his home country while taking advantage of the Canadian dollar’s strength against the Brazilian real (1 CAD = 3.80 BRL at the time).
According to Numbeo, the average apartment rental price was 56.2% lower in São Paulo than Toronto, with Brazilians paying about the equivalent of $1,000 CAD per month for a one-bedroom apartment in the city. We haven’t seen prices like those in Toronto since 2012.
I began apartment-hunting on local Brazilian rental platforms like Quinto Andar and Imovelweb and quickly had a harsh reality check.
It’s not uncommon to require renters to supply their own appliances in Brazil; I was not prepared to outfit a full kitchen for a four-month stay.
Leases under 12 months in São Paulo were basically nonexistent. Even if I had found one – and had a local family member co-sign as a guarantor, since foreigners without one typically have to pay double the rent upfront as a security deposit – the Brazilian definition of ‘furnished’ was vastly different from mine. It’s not uncommon to require renters to supply their own appliances in Brazil; I was not prepared to outfit a full kitchen for a four-month stay.
It was clear that São Paulo, despite its coworking spaces and digital nomad visa, didn’t have options for medium-duration stays like ours.
We wound up where pretty much every short-term renter does: Airbnb. Even with a discount for staying more than 30 days, we were stuck paying tourist prices, more than double the average rent in the neighbourhood – and not far off from the typical cost of a Toronto apartment.
Digital nomadism and the promise of geographic arbitrage
As of 2025, 50 million people globally were living as digital nomads – working while travelling – thanks to the mainstreaming of remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Canadians make up just 0.5% of the world population, but they account for a whopping 5% of the world’s digital nomads, according to Nomad.com’s 2026 State of Digital Nomads report. That means one out of every 20 digital nomads hails from the Great White North.
This tenfold overrepresentation is partially a result of Canada’s persisting housing affordability crisis. As of 2024, Habitat for Humanity found that almost one-third of Canadian millennials reported considering relocating to another country to find affordable housing.
Digital nomads typically leverage comfortable salaries earned working remotely while residing in countries with a more affordable cost of living, a strategy called geographic arbitrage.
“If you make money in a strong currency, in dollars or in euros, and then you start to live in a place like Southeast Asia or Mexico, your buying power can go a lot further,” says Michael Kim, a financial coach from Toronto who is himself a digital nomad, currently based in Mexico.
But geographic arbitrage largely assumes, much like I did, that you can actually access local prices for important expenses like rent.
The Airbnb-ification of renting abroad
“A lot of people think that it's a lot more affordable to be a digital nomad, and then they actually become a digital nomad,” Kim says. Some expenses, like food, will cost less in Chiang Mai than in Canada, he says, but that’s not necessarily the case for infrastructure costs such as housing and healthcare. “Short-term living – spending, let's say, a month or a few weeks in a place – is actually very expensive. You're likely going to use Airbnb or other platforms that have inflated rent prices."
Nomads wind up on Airbnb or similar third-party platforms because it’s the option with the least friction, he explains. To rent from a local, you often have to already be in the country.
It can take months to navigate the government bureaucracy and get set up with a local ID, let alone a bank account – likely longer than you even planned to stay in the country.
“You’d have to meet a local person, or see a for sale sign on the street and contact that person,” he says. “There’s also more of a grey area when it comes to lease agreements; some places will expect cash, some places will require a long-term lease.”
As a foreigner, you might not have the local identification required to make your rental agreement official, Kim adds. It can take months to navigate the government bureaucracy and get set up with a local ID, let alone a bank account – likely longer than you even planned to stay in the country.
“So the convenience of just using your credit card to book directly on Airbnb, that’s what you’re paying for,” he says.
That means to properly calculate your expenses as a digital nomad, you should start with the median price of an Airbnb in your city of choice, not the average local rent. Sites like Nomads.com or Nomadlio report these numbers for most popular nomad destinations around the world, but even their estimates seem conservative based on my own experience. The best source is the rental platforms themselves, once you’ve input your must-have criteria.
Digital nomad visas only get you through the door
Since 2020, more than 50 countries around the world have rolled out digital nomad visas, says Hari KC, a migration scholar and research fellow at Toronto Metropolitan University.
You might think that these visas would help cut through any red tape preventing nomads from accessing local infrastructure. But in their research, KC found that countries mostly just retrofitted existing visa pathways for tourists or immigrants, rather than creating a new one that takes into account the actual lifestyle patterns of digital nomads.
By continuing to think of nomads either as tourists who hang around longer or as permanent-residents-in-the-making, governments have made it easier for nomads to enter a country, but haven’t made necessities accessible to them once they arrive.
“What really makes life affordable – rent, access to basic services – is tied to being a long-term resident in the majority of countries. So if you are a digital nomad, you have to be navigating flexible living arrangements and healthcare systems, which tend to be more expensive,” KC says.
Ignoring nomads results in financial fallout
Without government involvement, KC says, the private sector has taken over the short- and medium-term rental market – and locals get priced out.
“In places where people who are already on the margins of the society were living, they were displaced because [developers] wanted to build apartment buildings to cater to digital nomads, to Airbnbs charging high rent,” he says, citing Mexico City, where an influx of post-pandemic remote workers drove up rents and displaced lower-income residents.
The average local’s monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Mexico City is $1,588 CAD, according to Numbeo, whereas Nomadlio reports the median price for a one-bedroom Airbnb in the city at $2,642 CAD. That’s a 66% markup. When short-term rentals are that much more lucrative, long-term rental supply dries up and everyone ends up paying more.
What made these places worth moving to – the local culture, the community – tends to disappear along with the people who can no longer afford to stay.
In cities like Lisbon, Portugal, the average local rent has risen to $2,217 CAD, within just a few hundred dollars of the $2,662 CAD average on Airbnb. This has priced locals out of parishes like Santa Maria Maior, which is now estimated to be more than 68% short-term rentals.
Costs increase so much that eventually even nomads are priced out. “It is to the disadvantage of digital nomads themselves, and of course the locals,” KC says. What made these places worth moving to – the local culture, the community – tends to disappear along with the people who can no longer afford to stay.
The beginnings of global living infrastructure
A combination of cities and private organizations are starting to experiment with fixes, though adoption levels remain limited. For example, a couple of “nomad villages” have sprung up – in Madeira, Portugal and Pipa, Brazil – as co-living communities designed specifically for remote workers from abroad. But these villages are few and far between, and arguably further isolate nomads from the communities they’re supposedly trying to integrate into.
Private organizations have had more success creating local-style infrastructure for nomad healthcare coverage. There are a growing number of insurance providers that cover medical expenses across borders, like SafetyWing, which maintains a network of providers that allows nomads to get medical care the way locals do, rather than paying upfront and filing claims from abroad.
“That is one of the ways we're trying to create infrastructure that blends with the local one," says Victor Nourrissat, head of growth at SafetyWing.
Perpetuating the unaffordability spiral
Despite early exploration of global infrastructure, most countries continue to design for long-term locals, not short-term visitors.
When we Canadians pack our bags to escape the rising cost of living for a while, we aren’t actually accessing a more affordable alternative. In fact, by paying inflated prices for Airbnbs abroad, we’re recreating the same unaffordable conditions for locals – and eventually, for ourselves – that we were trying to avoid at home.
Until we accept that, we’ll continue to fly around the world to escape our affordability problem, just to create another one when we land.
