The latest issue of Canadian Apartment Magazine contains an interesting article which I recommend reading. Here’s a link to the article: https://www.reminetwork.com/articles/purpose-built-rental-pro-formas-under-pressure/ The article quotes from Paul Morassutti, a CBRE executive, who comments on the findings of a report on construction costs made by another consulting firm, Finnegan Marshall. Morassutti’s quotes are interesting since he describes and comments on recent… Read more »
The Toronto Star published an article this past Sunday (August 8) which had some eye-popping opening paragraphs, worth quoting in full: And 1995 is roughly the year that Torontonians would have had to apply for subsidized housing for a chance to secure any one-bedroom units that became vacant in 2021 at 133 Broadway Avenue, a 52-unit Toronto Community Housing lowrise… Read more »
Data shows that 1B and 2B rental units are by far the most plentiful unit types, together making up over 80% of all purpose-built rental units in southern Ontario’s 59 largest cities and towns. This means they contribute the bulk of rent revenues. However, 1B and 2B rents are often quite different, and the different quantities of each unit type… Read more »
Several times during my 15+ years in the rental housing industry I’ve been told that “rentals don’t work”, usually by people who work in accounting or finance, and sometimes by people who are new to the rental housing industry. Their basic assertion is that they’ve “done the math” and found rentals “aren’t profitable,” and therefore it makes no sense to… Read more »
Local media ran an article recently (in the St Catharines Standard print edition, June 23, 2021) describing a proposal to construct a new condo tower in downtown St Catharines, the city directly across Lake Ontario from Toronto. St Catharines had a population in 2016 of just over 133,000 people, or about 4.9% the size of Toronto. This condo project, if… Read more »
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 »
The National Bank of Canada last month released a document which they call their ‘Housing Affordability Monitor’ which tracks historical affordability of ownership housing—condo and non-condo—in ten of Canada’s largest cities. You can download the document in PDF format from the link below. https://www.nbc.ca/content/dam/bnc/en/rates-and-analysis/economic-analysis/housing-affordability.pdf Everyone knows that housing prices keep going up and up and up and keep getting less… Read more »
Beyond rental housing, one of my interests is personal investing, which, to learn more about, I read lots of articles and listen to podcasts. Recently I read an article entitled “The Limits of Numbers in Life and Investing” by Vishal Khandelwal. It makes some great points about data and numbers in investing and you can read it via the link… Read more »
I’m just back from the future! When I started in this industry leasing services were a big thing, a major business element for property management firms, and a significant source of revenue for many consultants. Vacancies were high in the less desirable buildings—can you imagine 5% or 10% vacant in Toronto? That’s what it was like, and landlords were willing… Read more »
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 »
