Several months back I was having lunch with a friend in the industry and we were talking about the small number of rentals constructed in Toronto every year despite huge demand for new, condo-equivalent rentals in the city. We agreed that we didn’t really expect anything to change, since developers prefer to build and sell condos, while the few developers… Read more »
Any market survey intended to be used as a guide for setting rents should compare total monthly renting costs versus total monthly home ownership costs. After all, if it costs more per month to rent than to own, why would households rent a house or apartment if they can own a condo or house for less? Answering this question properly… Read more »
Over the last year or so I’ve come across articles discussing if new rentals entering a housing market suppress rents and cause them to flatten or decrease, in sort of a supply versus demand relationship. Some articles claim to have found that rents overall increase with supply growth while other articles claim to have found that rents decrease with supply… Read more »
In my first post in this series I examined the size of the non-purpose-built or unofficial rental supply in Ontario’s ten largest cities. In this post I discuss the three main types of non-purpose-built rentals, comment on their importance, and explain why knowing all of this is important. The non-purpose-built rental supply can be separated into the following three categories:… Read more »
The St Catharines Standard, my local newspaper, recently published an article (on August 16) reporting on a recent city council debate and vote about one councillor’s suggestion to apply a special tax on “vacant homes” in the city to encourage landlords to rent them out instead of letting them sit vacant, and to use the tax proceeds to support the… Read more »