CHANGING RENTAL HOUSING DYNAMICS & THE PANDEMIC
Corporation ’s (CMHC) Housing Information Portal. In this case, “purpose-built” refers to homes that are intended for the exclusive use of tenants (for example, an apartment building with a single owner and multiple units) while the “secondary market” refers to privately-owned condos that are rented. The term “apartment” refers to homes that share a common building entryway and whose doors open into a common corridor, and therefore excludes ground-oriented accommodation such as detached homes and townhomes. Note, the purpose-built rental data from CMHC that is presented herein encompasses, but does not distinguish among, age of building or building type (i.e. woodframe or concrete). • Monthly listings for the secondary rental market, which includes non-purpose-built rental properties such as individually-owned rental homes, is described using data from rennie intelligence ’s Rental Database, which tracks the count of listings per both publicly-available rental websites and the Multiple Listing Service (MLS). • Both the MLS and the Canadian Real Estate Association , provided pricing data related to the resale housing market across Canada. • Demographic and employment data presented herein are from various Statistics Canada surveys and publications, including the Demographic Estimates Compendium, the Labour Force Survey, and the Census.
• Annual tourism data was sourced from Destination British Columbia , the provincially funded crown corporation that works to promote tourism throughout BC. It publishes industry performance reports highlighting a range of indicators, from international visitor arrivals to average daily room rates. • Trends in and features of the short-term rental market in the city of Vancouver have been developed using data on Airbnb listings compiled from Inside Airbnb . This platform collects listing data from Airbnb.com, including the number of homes listed and their respective attributes, prices, availability, and location, among other things. The data is collected on a monthly basis and is a snapshot in time. The Airbnb segment of the city of Vancouver’s short-term rental market is used in this report as a proxy for the entire short-term rental market in the city, as Airbnb maintains a significant market share among short-term rental listing platforms. For example, the City of Vancouver’s 2019 short-term rental highlight report indicated that Airbnb maintains an 84% short-term rental market share in the city, while Air DNA (a website that provides short-term rental analytics), estimates Airbnb’s share at 90%.
02. RECENT SHIFTS IN RENTAL
Since the pandemic took hold across Canada in early 2020, low interest rates, substantial government financial support, stock market volatility, and a desire on the part of many people to secure homes that better suit lives that are seen as being increasingly spent in said homes have created conditions that have supported the ownership side of the housing market. As a consequence, Canadian cities from coast to coast have seen property values rise rapidly, from a 37% year-over-year increase in the average sold price of a home in Halifax to a 23% increase in Victoria (through February 2021). In many senses, the ownership market has moved in a seemingly counter-cyclical manner since the pandemic began.
In contrast to ownership markets being unperturbed by economic and demographic shortcomings related to the pandemic, Canada’s rental housing markets have been impacted in a way that is consistent with recessionary conditions, with vacancy rates rising and rents rising
relatively slowly. VACANCY RATES
Nationally, the purpose-built rental apartment vacancy rate rose over the past year, going from 2.2% in October 2019 to 3.2% in October 2020. In looking at Canada’s eight largest Census Metropolitan Areas (CMAs), the same direction of change held, with vacancy rates rising across the
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