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 »
To start, let’s state the obvious: the easiest way to ensure your new rental building leases quickly and starts generating revenues as soon as possible is to ask rents which are affordable or ‘attainable’. But few, if any, developers have the luxury of asking rents that the bulk of renters can afford. The reality is that every developer, given development… Read more »
Choosing asking rents for new purpose-built rentals is one of the key tasks which developers need to get right if they want their new rentals to be successful, both in terms of being absorbed into the housing supply in a timely manner, and in terms of generating the highest possible rent revenues. If your rents are too low your building… 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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »