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Rent prices in Canada soared last year as supply struggled to keep up with demand, leading to the lowest national vacancy rate on record since the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. began tracking that data in 1988.
The federal housing agency said in a report Wednesday the vacancy rate for purpose-built rental apartments sat at 1.5 per cent during the first two weeks of October 2023, when it conducted its annual survey.
That was down from 1.9 per cent a year earlier, which at the time had been the lowest national vacancy rate in over two decades.
The average rent for a two-bedroom purpose-built apartment, which the CMHC uses as its representative sample, grew eight per cent to $1,359 in 2023. That growth figure was up from the 5.6 per cent average rent increase recorded in 2022 and above the 1990-2022 average of 2.8 per cent.
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How about banning corporations from owning single family homes or thousands of condo units? I bet that would go a long way towards solving the housing crisis. I used to live in a 200 unit condo complex and the majority of units were owned by 3 people who used that majority to push through whatever they wanted on the condo board. An absolutely massive tax on housing you don’t actually live in would help make housing more accessible. Housing shouldn’t be an investment. Nationalize it.
Given those corporations are, you know, renting those units, I’m not sure what your comment has to do with a rental unit supply issue (which is, you know, what this article is about).
The average rent for a two-bedroom purpose-built apartment, which the CMHC uses as its representative sample, grew eight per cent to $1,359 in 2023. That growth figure was up from the 5.6 per cent average rent increase recorded in 2022 and above the 1990-2022 average of 2.8 per cent.
I’m guessing that is the average people are paying on their rent for their current contract. I wonder what the cost is for people entering a new rental agreement.
It’s around $1700 for a one bedroom where I am. $1359 for a two bedroom sounds like a dream.
That’s close to $4k a year. That’s a pretty sizeable difference.
Canada needs to let us build homes and let developers build dense towers of condos. This is 100% a supply issue.
Which also means it’s a density issue. The solution can’t be a sprawl of more single family homes, either.
I absolutely agree, though I live on the west coast where we’ll have dense city blocks that immediately run off into crown land. I also want to densify urban areas but it’s expensive to buy land when single family homes (even in the boonies) are so expensive to buy.
Oh yeah it’ll take a generation to undo a generation’s worth of bad zoning and urban planning. But it’s the only real long term solution. No high population urban area on the planet sustains itself with a high level of sprawl (without truly outlandish taxes to pay for the necessary infrastructure – looking at you New Jersey).
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The federal housing agency said in a report Wednesday the vacancy rate for purpose-built rental apartments sat at 1.5 per cent during the first two weeks of October 2023, when it conducted its annual survey.
The average rent for a two-bedroom purpose-built apartment, which the CMHC uses as its representative sample, grew eight per cent to $1,359 in 2023.
Although rental supply rose in most Canadian cities last year, it was not enough to keep pace with increased demand pressures caused by population and employment growth.
“You have newly arrived immigrants, obviously, but you have also young Canadians that are seeking their first home and you also have older households who are needing to downsize.”
He said with affordability challenges plaguing the home ownership market, especially amid last year’s high inflation and interest rate environment, more Canadians are looking to rental options.
The pair predicted that imbalance is “likely to persist for the foreseeable future” as the Bank of Canada forecasts population growth of about 800,000 in both 2024 and 2025, “with only a limited increase in housing starts.”
The original article contains 655 words, the summary contains 179 words. Saved 73%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
