When John Mercer said that the demand for rental housing in Toronto is outpacing demand, he wasn’t kidding and he certainly wasn’t exaggerating.
Mercer is the Toronto Real Estate Board’s director of market analysis and was quoted in a release about how the local rental market is heading skyward – in a big way. The TREB was discussing Q2 findings about rentals in Toronto listed on the MLS’s own rentals search tool (which isn’t a GREAT indicator, because let’s face it, it’s certainly not the best rental listings search tool out there). Anyway, the findings were pretty staggering:
There were 8,821 condo units rented out in TO in Q2 of 2015…
…compared to 7,333 in Q2 of 2014.
That’s an increase of 20.3%.
Whoa. But then, there’s this:
“For TREB’s market area as a whole, average rents for one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments, which made up a combined 94 per cent of rental transactions, were up by 1.5 and 4.5 per cent respectively to $1,608 and $2,239.”
The SUPPLY of rental units on the market increased 23% year-over-year, and still, rental prices increased by somewhere around 1.5% to 4.5%.
Friends and fellow renters, let’s all come together in a giant, city-wide hug for mutual support through this painful and income-annihilating time in our lives.