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 »
Canadian Apartment (Magazine?) posted last week an article about “rent slippage” among multifamily rental properties caused by the pandemic. The article was written by Barbara Carss of Canadian Property Management. The article can be read in full via the following link. https://www.reminetwork.com/articles/multifamily-rent-slippage-deemed-temporary-blip/ Most of the article reports on the findings of an index prepared by MSCI which tracks net operating… Read more »
One thing that developers often wonder about is the effect new rentals have on vacancies. Does delivering a bunch of newly constructed rental units to a (housing) market cause vacancies to increase? Or will there be no affect? Everyone will agree that delivering a relatively small number of new units to a large housing market will probably have little or… Read more »
Last week I discussed the notion of home ownership as an investment, something which has been a good choice for many Canadians over the past decade or so, although it’s been a questionable choice for many Americans, putting aside the run-up in housing prices in the US during the pandemic. This week I provide links to two additional articles on… Read more »
Just before Christmas I came across an interesting article which does a good high-level job of pointing out some of the contradictions in housing policy with regard to ownership versus renting and how that relationship results in less affordable/’affordable’ housing than society requires. The article dates from 2016 and focuses on the US, but it’s worth a look. Here’s the… Read more »
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 »
In my post last (last) week I talked about ‘trickle down’ supply issues and explained my reasons why I don’t think it results in increased affordability or increased access to affordable rents (some extreme situations excepted). One of the assertions I made was that rents in older buildings will keep going up, no matter how many new buildings—i.e. high-rent rentals—are… Read more »
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 »
This post is a follow up to my previous post last week (dated September 22, 2021) which examined the “gap” in average rents between 1B and 2B units in southern Ontario’s twenty largest cities. In that post I found that the gap in average rents shrank from 2010 to 2020, implying a convergence in 1B and 2B rents, which I… Read more »
In a previous post (dated August 4, 2021) I examined the contribution to rent revenues that 1B and 2B purpose-built rental units make and found that 0B and 1B units contribute a lower percentage to estimated total average rent revenues than their percentage of rental supply. In this post I’m going to take a look at the “gap” between average… Read more »