High price of apartments forces tenants to dig deep
Gillian Shaw
Sun
Francois Tremblay recently moved to Vancouver from Quebec and is devastated by how much he must pay in rent for a tiny room just off Fraser Street in east Vancouver. Photograph by : Mark Van Manen, Vancouver Sun
Francois Tremblay was hit by rental sticker shock when he moved to Vancouver from his home in Quebec City and found the money he’d pay for a furnished one-bedroom suite in Quebec gets him little more than a bare room here.
Tremblay’s plight is one shared by many accommodation seekers as the rental vacancy rate for the Vancouver area has plunged to its lowest level since 1989, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s 2006 rental market survey released Thursday.
At 0.7 per cent, the vacancy rate for the Vancouver census metropolitan area has dropped by half from last year’s 1.4 per cent and leaves the city trailing only Victoria and Calgary, both at 0.5 per cent, as the toughest place in Canada to find rental accommodation.
Today’s rate is only marginally ahead of 1989 when the Vancouver CMA recorded a vacancy rate of 0.4 per cent and the rate has only dropped below one per cent twice since then, in 1990 and 1994.
“In Vancouver you have to be quick, if you don’t rent right away when you see a place it will be gone,” said Tremblay, a Web developer who moved here both for the city’s natural attributes and for the opportunities it provides in his work in multimedia.
Tremblay is looking for new digs, but with a budget around $450 he holds out no hope of finding an apartment and will settle for a room.
“I pay $450 and that doesn’t include anything; I pay for my gas, hydro, cable, Internet and phone,” he said of his current accommodation which he is leaving in the wake of a rampage by his roommate that left the apartment trashed. “For the same price as a room here in Quebec City you can have a fully furnished one-bedroom apartment.”
The rental squeeze has driven up rates with Vancouver coming second only to Toronto as the most expensive city in Canada to rent an apartment. The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment Vancouver climbed to $1,045 a month this year, up from last year’s $1,004.
In Toronto, the same apartment would cost a few bucks more at $1,067 while two bedrooms in
Calgary would set you back $960 a month.
Figures from the CMHC survey show renters would fare better in Windsor, Ont., where the vacancy rate at 10.4 per cent is the highest in Canada. Atlantic Canada has some of the highest vacancy rates with Saint John, New Brunswick and St. John’s, Newfoundland coming behind Windsor at 6.8 and 5.1 per cent respectively.
The vacancy rate for Abbotsford was down to 2 per cent in October from 3.8 per cent a year earlier and Victoria’s rate was unchanged, leaving it one of the tightest rental markets in the country for the third year running.
Overall, vacancy rates across the country dipped a marginal 0.1 percentage points to 2.6 per cent in October 2006 compared to last year as job growth and income gains drove up demand for both home ownership and rental accommodation, according to the CMHC.
Tremblay, who has been in Vancouver for three months, is part of a migration here that is at its highest since 1997. According to the CMHC, some 28,000 new residents arrived in the Vancouver area in 2005, many coming from other parts of Canada and the world.
That, combined with a lack of new purpose-built rental accommodation coming on the market and delays in condo construction has put heavy pressure on the supply of rental units.
A lot of condos are being built but many are delayed because of a shortage of trades, so people can’t move into the condos they bought,” said Bryan Yu, market analyst with the CMHC.
“Also higher home prices have pushed up mortgage carrying costs in the past year or so.”
In Greater Vancouver, West Vancouver has the priciest places at $1,590 for the average two-bedroom, compared to the city of Vancouver’s $1,241. The cheapest place to rent in the Vancouver area is Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows at $772 a month for a two-bedroom apartment.
The escalation in rental rates is hitting Yaletown resident Barney Hickey and his partner Jan Meyers particularly hard as they search for a new place to live after their apartment was sold and the new owner gave them notice to move out.
“For the last 11 years we have paid $1,400 for a two-bedroom, two-bathroom condo in Yaletown — it’s a nice place on the 19th floor and it faces English Bay,” said Hickey, who teaches nursing at Langara. “The same type of suite in Yaletown is probably $2,500.
Hickey and Meyers know they can’t match their accommodation in downtown Vancouver and have widened their search.
“We are looking anywhere on the SkyTrain route because my partner works as a consultant downtown and he uses public transportation,” said Hickey.
Hickey said they turned down one prospect in north Burnaby where the landlady was willing to drop the rent on three bedrooms to $2,000 from $2,500. But Hickey said they felt the suite would be too noisy because the landlord lived in the basement with three dogs .
“I have called lots of places and people don’t even call you back,” he said. “All I can say is places are going really fast.”
Kirill Roiz has been searching for a one-bedroom apartment after acquiring a cat and being told to vacate his no-pets suite.
“I have been looking for over three months now and I don’t have time to be picky,” said Roiz, who must move by Dec. 31. “Hopefully I’ll find something.
“As long as it’s not falling apart and doesn’t have cockroaches.”
For the first time the CMHC broadened it rental market coverage to include condominiums that weren’t built specifically for the rental market. Vancouver tied with Toronto at 0.4 per cent for the lowest vacancy rate in condominium rentals in the country.
“In general, in Vancouver the picture doesn’t change much, with the vacancy rate at 0.4 per cent while conventional stock is at 0.7 per cent,” Yu said of the estimated 28,500 condominiums that are available for rent in the area in addition to rental apartments.
DIGGING FOR DIGS
The national rental apartment vacancy rate inched down to 2.6 per cent in October, according to the Rental Market Survey released Thursday by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, but Greater Vancouver apartment hunters can only dream of a vacancy rate that high.
Vacancy rates, Oct., 2006
Vancouver: 0.7%
Edmonton: 1.2%
Calgary: 0.5%
Saskatoon: 3.2%
Winnipeg: 1.3%
Toronto: 3.2%
Montreal: 2.7%
Halifax: 3.2%
Vancouver’s October vacancy rates, 2002-2006
2002: 1.4%
2003: 2.0%
2004: 1.3%
2005: 1.4%
2006: 0.7%
© The Vancouver Sun 2006