Monthly Archives: October 2019

Consulting: The Other ABC

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For consultants one of the key rules is ABC = Always Be Closing. It’s a cliché, of course, and in some circles a dark joke, but for anyone who doesn’t have a salary or a steady income it’s no laughing matter—it’s your job, it’s what you have to do every day. But that’s not the only way to think about… Read more »

Rental Supply Density in Southern Ontario

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Rental supply density is a calculation that compares a city or town’s total population to its total amount of rentals and is expressed as the ratio of total rental units for every 1,000 people. Basically, the higher the rental supply density number, the greater the number of rentals versus the city’s population. The number of rentals used in the calculation… Read more »

RBC’s Recent Report on Rental Housing: Some Comments

RBC’s economics department recently (September 25, 2019) released a report written by Robert Hogue, a senior economist with the bank, entitled Big City Rental Blues: A Look At Canada’s Rental Housing Deficit. You can download a PDF copy of the RBC report via the following links. http://www.rbc.com/economics/economic-reports/canadian-housing-forecast.html http://www.rbc.com/economics/economic-reports/pdf/canadian-housing/housing_rental_sep2019.pdf Discussions about rental housing are music to my ears, so I downloaded… Read more »

Site Selection Criteria: Some General Ideas

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Finding sites suitable for new rentals can be a challenge. Land is getting in short supply everywhere, and where it isn’t, prices are high, often too high to justify developing rental housing; it’s always about the money. But that shouldn’t stop us from thinking about site selection criteria to help developers identify locations suitable for new rentals, which can be… Read more »

Unofficial Rentals, Part III

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In my two previous posts on the topic of non-purpose-built or unofficial rentals I showed that in the ten largest cities in southern Ontario the number of non-purpose-built rentals can be quite large, often thousands of dwellings, and I discussed the different types of non-purpose-built rentals and why it’s important they are included in market surveys. In my first post,… Read more »