For months, Nathan Armstrong has been scrolling through the apartment lists from a small motel room in Woodstock, Ont. He and his wife have had to live there for more than a year while desperately looking for a place to rent. =
“There’s not much, and it looks like they’re going up. Fifteen, seventeen, one thousand nine hundred dollars for a one-bedroom apartment,” he said. “Our price range is disappearing.”
Armstrong described the situation as frustrating and costly. The couple could not even prepare their own meals at the motel.
“It’s very, very difficult,” he said. “Hard to cook because it doesn’t allow us to have our own kitchen stuff. Not toaster, that goes against the fire code.”
The couple says they faced denial after denial, losing dozens of apartments amid stiff competition during their 16-month search for stable housing.
In fact, rents are rising rapidly in the area, according to a recent report from Rentals.ca and Bullpen Research and Consulting. Average rental of apartments in the nearest major city: London, Ont. – rose to $ 1,933 in June, 28.5 percent more than at the same time last year.
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Some Canadians are getting smaller and smaller as the cost of rent increases across the country.
Some analysts predict that the rental market may be even hotter across Canada. Ben Myers, president of Bullpen Research & Consulting, a real estate advisory firm, says higher interest rates are pushing potential home buyers away, putting more pressure on the rental market, he said.
“These two factors will keep tenants on their properties, further reducing the rental offer,” Myers said.
Rental supply has also been a constant problem in Halifax. There, the unemployment rate is less than one percent, among the lowest in the country, according to the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation.
“We have new constructions and existing constructions, but they can’t keep up with the number of people looking for rental units,” said Lesley Dunn, director of the RentersEd program, which educates Canadians about renting.
Rental prices are rising across Canada
He says lower-income households are shrinking rapidly, as rents are rising faster than people’s paychecks. Dunn says the rental market is so hot that it is unfairly pressuring applicants.
“You’re now being asked to pay three months’ rent before being considered for an apartment. That’s devastating,” Dunn said.
“For most newcomers, for most young people, for most homeless people, for most people with fixed incomes, there’s no way they can afford that.”
The market is also tight for tenants in larger cities as they are the most expensive. The highest average apartment rentals in Canada are in Vancouver, at $ 2,936 a month, nearly 25 percent more than a year ago, according to Rentals.ca. In Toronto, the average apartment is $ 2,463 a month, almost 20% more than a year ago. Experts have pointed to a drop for decades in the construction of homes specifically for rent, known as specifically built rents, as another underlying reason for supply problems.
Murtaza Haider, a professor of management at Metropolitan University of Toronto, says specifically designed rentals offer more rental stability than condominiums, where homeowners who focus on investing are more likely to take their properties out of the rental market to sell them whenever they deem it the time. right.
“Built-in rentals specifically offer security of tenure because you know it’s a rental property and it will remain as rent for them for the time being,” he said.
“The government has a big role to play”
Haider wants all levels of government to work together to encourage more construction.
“The government has a big role to play. They can encourage builders in this market by changing the playing field … in favor of building more special rents,” he said. “The impetus is that we don’t wait 50 years or even five more years and we start making those changes.”
After 16 long months, Armstrong says he and his wife finally found a place to call home.
Nathan Armstrong and his wife lived for more than a year in a motel in Woodstock, Ontario, because they could not find an affordable apartment. (Rob Krbavac / CBC)
“It feels amazing. A kitchen to cook to help save money on food costs, especially now with the price of everything going up,” he said.
He hopes the rental market will improve for others who begin the search.
“It should never have taken more than a year to finally get a permanent place to live,” he said.