Montreal rental vacancy dips to new lows this year

Official measures have placed Montreal’s overall rental vacancy rate at 1.9%, considerably below the 2.8% seen last year.

Scarcity is even more acute in apartments offering three bedrooms or more, with a vacancy rate of just around 0.8%.

These numbers continue the trend of rental market tightness in Canada’s largest markets. An estimated 31,000 homes across Canada were used for Airbnb rental so frequently in 2018 that they have become essentially unavailable for long-term rentals, according to new research by McGill University.

This sum is sufficient to accommodate everyone in North Vancouver, the researchers noted. This is also equivalent to approximately 1.5% of Canada’s purpose-built rental housing.

Montreal, together with Toronto and Vancouver, accounted for 40% of the aforementioned 31,000 homes, and represented nearly half of Canada’s average daily listings last year.

These significant limitations in supply have proven to be major market influences. As much as 130 households still needed places to move to as of July 1.

“People who don’t have a good income have no place to go because there’s just no affordable housing in Montreal right now,” Front d’action populaire en réaménagement urbain (FRAPRU) spokesperson Véronique Laflamme told Global News

Making matters worse is tenant discrimination, with some property owners making their rent-out decisions based on family size, Laflamme noted.

“A lot of landlords don’t want to rent to people with kids.”

Ephraim Vecina

Ephraim is currently a journalist at Mortgage Broker News, Real Estate Professional and Canadian Real Estate Wealth.

Ephraim is a highly accomplished news reporter whose work has been published across North America and the Asia Pacific region. Before joining Key Media, Ephraim spent eight years working as a journalist with Reuters TV. His areas of expertise include real estate, mortgage, and finance.

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