In Calgary, apartment building construction is booming as more Canadians embrace rentals
CBC
Across the country, competition is stiff among apartment hunters as the rental market gets tighter. In Calgary, that struggle to find rental space is fuelling an unprecedented amount of rental construction.
As of September, construction has begun on 2,799 new rental apartment buildings in Calgary this year. That's the highest number on record, though 2021 was another banner year with 2,572 apartment starts, numbers from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) show.
Developers describe it as a classic Economics 101 scenario: supply rising to meet demand.
For years, they say a lack of rental construction in Calgary has left that side of the market underserved. On the demand side, higher interest rates are driving more people to rent rather than own.
The province is also seeing a significant uptick in people moving to the province, with more than 50,000 coming to Alberta to live in the first half of 2022 alone.
"We have this huge void space compared to a lot of the other major metropolitan cities within Canada of rental housing," said Alkarim Devani, president of the Calgary-based development company RNDSQR, which has shifted in recent years to building rentals exclusively.
"We've had almost a 20-year gap of rental product, and so that's why we're seeing such an influx of it."
According to the latest numbers from Rentals.ca, the average Canadian rental apartment was $1,810 a month in September, up about 12 per cent from the previous year.
In Calgary, the average one-bedroom rental was $1,629, an increase of 29 per cent year-over-year.
Calgary isn't the only city that's seeing some shift toward rentals.
In several big cities, the share of apartments being built for rentals, rather than condominium ownership, has grown in the first half of this year compared to the average for the same period in the previous five, according to CMHC numbers.
One exception is Toronto, where the share of rental construction dipped in the first half of 2022, something CMHC analyst Michael Mak says is likely due in part to the high cost of land in that city.
"There are rising interest rates … and rising construction costs and labour costs, and those all play a factor in lower rental starts," he said.
In Vancouver, development firm Anthem Properties is pushing hard on multi-family rentals, with about 3,000 units that are either in preliminary planning stages, under review or under construction, most in Metro Vancouver, according to Gage Marchand, the company's manager of investment.
P.E.I.'s Public Schools Branch is looking for 50 substitute bus drivers, and it'll be recruiting at three job fairs on Saturday, June 8. The job fairs are located at the Atlantic Superstore in Montague, Royalty Crossing in Charlottetown, and the bus parking lot of Three Oaks Senior High in Summerside. All three run from 9 a.m. until noon. Dave Gillis, the director of transportation and risk management for the Public Schools Branch, said the number of substitute drivers they're hiring isn't unusual. "We are always looking for more. Our drivers tend to have an older demographic," he said.