When Christine Grice, a single mother, started looking for apartments to rent in Dundas, a network in Hamilton, Ontario, in June, she said she was surprised by what she saw.
It’s just that a two-bedroom apartment costs $1,795 in the same building where Grice rented a 3 bedroom apartment for $1,650 just 3 years earlier.
It’s just that the rents seem to go up while Grice watches.
“Your says $1,399 (per month), but … Once there, it costs $1,499,” he says.
Grice says he has detected immediate increases in renting professionally controlled large houses and advertised basement apartments in Kijiji.
And the available sets are recovering at a record speed, he said.
“You have to be quick,” he says, recalling how an apartment advertised for rent on Friday already had requests the next day.
“I think it’s ridiculous that I can’t live in the city I grew up in,” he says.
Lease wars and fierce festivals were regime fees in expensive markets like Toronto and Vancouver before the pandemic. But with the lifting of government restrictions and the resumption of activity in the rental and real estate market, some of this frenzy of giant cities is spreading to small neighboring cities.
Hamilton experienced a 37% year-on-year increase in lease transactions in June, said Mustafa Abbasi, president and director of genuine online real estate market Zolo.ca, who brought knowledge from the Hamilton and Burlington Real Estate Association.
At the same time, the average hiring was more than nine cents year-over-year in July, from $2,200 to $2,400.
The numbers are a “substantial increase” in rental calls in the region, he said.
One phenomenon appears to be occurring in Abbotsford, British Columbia, about an hour’s drive east of Vancouver, Abbasi notes.
There, rents increased by 15.8% in June at the same time last year, one of the largest increases in Canada, according to Abbasi.
These trends are in stark contrast to what is happening in Toronto and Vancouver, where the pandemic is putting downward pressure on rents.
The average rent for an empty one-bedroom apartment in Toronto has dropped more than 9% from the previous year, while two-bedroom apartments are now 4.4% cheaper, according to research conducted through the list of rentals Rentals.ca.
In Vancouver, the average one bedroom rent has remained virtually unchanged, while the average two-bedroom rent is now 6.7% cheaper.
“Consumers are also in your paint area: do they have enough area to paint from the house at all times?”
Workers who have been limited to writing from the sofa of their studio crave more space. Parents who share the kitchen table with their children crave an office at home.
At the same time, as employers become accustomed to workers operating remotely, others in large cities feel they can move further away from the office, Abbasi says.
And Rentals.ca says he has noticed that the prospects for pages unique to several communities in Southern Ontario are accumulating between March and June of this year. Innisfil, an hour and 40 minutes north of Toronto, saw user interest grow by 124%. And Newmarket, London, St. Catharines and Niagara Falls recorded increases of more than 70%.
While Torontons arrived in Hamilton, Hamilton residents moved to St. Catharines and Niagara Falls, Ferrante said.
For his part, Grice still hopes to locate an apartment in Hamilton that can with his salary of $60,000.
She needs to locate a position where her 13-year-old double daughters can take care of their friends without having to get in the car, she says.