Generally speaking my visits to LinkedIn are rare but not long ago I checked in for a few minutes and happened to see the following post (dated August 30th) made by a marketing person in the industry: “When rents surge and supply gets tighter (like it is now) it becomes easy to forget the paradoxical fact that renters are the… Read more »
Last weekend (Sunday, June 5) the Toronto Star newspaper published an article written by Donovan Vincent which examined the mismatches between regulatory reality of Ontario’s planning process and the political promises of the re-elected Doug Ford government. The last topic in the article caught my eye. It was about so-called “streamlined development,” an initiative by the Ford government to encourage… Read more »
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 »
In this post (a follow-up to my post dated November 4, 2020), I use housing data from the Census and CMHC to separate rentals into purpose-built and non-purpose-built for the GTA’s major cities, adding owner-occupied units. The number of non-purpose-built rentals by type is calculated by subtracting purpose-built rentals from total rentals. The charts below show the results. The most… Read more »
That’s the question. What’s the answer? Most people when they think of rental housing they think of tall concrete apartment towers clustered in Toronto or Mississauga. It’s true that in most of Ontario’s larger cities multi-unit apartment buildings constitute the bulk of the rental supply, but many cities it’s a much smaller part of the supply than we realize. So… Read more »
Altus Group recently prepared a report for the Building Industry and Land Development Association, or BILD, which you can download the report from the link below: https://bildgta.ca/advocacy/reports According to Altus, the report is intended to “undertake a study of several factors that may be contributing to housing affordability issues in major housing markets across the Greater Toronto Area, such as… Read more »
You only get one chance to develop land. Recently, I was talking to a friend in the industry who, thanks to heavy traffic on the QEW, drove along the Oakville section of Dundas Street (Highway 5) for the first time in a year or two. Locals will know that this part of north Oakville is being rapidly developed as the… 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 »
Before digging deeply into rental housing, I want to make sure readers understand how the housing supply breaks down. First, the Census (conducted by Statistics Canada every five years) counts the total number of “occupied private dwellings”, which are all dwellings of any kind being occupied by households. In the Census, one dwelling is occupied by one household, and dwellings… Read more »
Welcome to ApartmentResearch.ca, a website devoted to researching and discussing rental apartments and rental housing in southern Ontario. Why rental housing? According to the 2016 Census, 30% of dwellings in Ontario are rented. That’s over 1.5 million apartments, condos, townhouses, duplexes, single family houses, basement apartments, rooms, and trailers. That’s a huge portion of Ontario’s housing supply and it’s worth… Read more »