Category Archives: Renters

The Alternative To Apartment Buildings

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Recently I’ve been digging through an old MS Word document into which I copy-and-pasted interesting anecdotes and funny jokes I came across whilst wandering around the interweb over the years. The following quote (source unknown) caught my eye: An alternative to apartment buildings would be neighborhoods full of tiny houses. Read it again, and then read it a few more… Read more »

What Are Renters Paying In Niagara?

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Late last year I wrote a post (dated September 21, 2020) which used Census data to answer the question, “What are renters renting in Niagara?” I found that the bulk of Niagara’s renter households are most likely to rent detached houses and units in multi-unit buildings with less than five floors, followed by multi-unit buildings with more than five floors…. Read more »

Trickle-Down Rental Housing Development Doesn’t Work

There’s a recent article which has been making the rounds titled “How luxury apartment buildings help low-income renters.” I think it showed up first on a US website but it’s been republished in Canada. I’ve included a link to a US website below so you can read the article (I suspect that’s where the article was published first). https://fullstackeconomics.com/how-luxury-apartment-buildings-help-low-income-renters/ The… Read more »

To Rent or Not To Rent

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One of the more common non-industry discussions about the industry has long been the renting versus owning question. Who comes out ahead over the long term? Is it the home owner who commits a huge amount of capital to home ownership and sees their house increase in value over time? Or is it the renter who rents an apartment or… Read more »

Maximizing Rent Increases

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In this post I’m going to revisit a topic I looked at in a post dated March 18, 2020: rent increases on turnover. In that post I compared several scenarios in which a hypothetical landlord raises rents by different amounts on turnover. I found that even in high vacancy markets in which large rent increases mean units might sit vacant… Read more »

Rental Housing Types: Risk vs Reward

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For some reason the other day I started thinking about the risks and rewards of different types of purpose-built rental housing. Risk is a complex thing and varies from project to project and developer to developer, but, at least from a high-level perspective, it’s probably best defined as absorption risk (how fast will available rentals be leased?) and to a… Read more »

Some Further Thoughts on Target Renters…

I remember that the first serious job I had to do when I started as a consultant in the rental housing industry (in my first week!) was to review a rent roll for a high-rise rental building in central Toronto, an older concrete slab tower almost entirely composed of 1 bed and 2 bed apartments. The landlord had kept reasonably… Read more »

Rents Always Go Up!

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By now we’ve all heard the famous quip thrown around by an online celebrity talking about equity markets in the United States: “stonks always go up!” Although it’s not true when talking about individual stocks, it’s definitely true when talking about broad-based indices such as the S&P500, at least over multi-year periods. There has been much discussion in Ontario about… Read more »