“The experience is that as a single parent… it is almost impossible to find anything, especially within my price range,” said Rebecca Martin, who has been calling dozens of places a month since August. Martin says that although she has two businesses, has a lot of credit and reports, she is still struggling to find a job for herself and her daughter.

With an average vacancy rate of just 1%, Calgary tenants are competing for the few remaining homes available

Rental prices have already risen 29 percent since the beginning of this year. And that could go even higher from now until the end of the summer. “Unless you are able to buy a place, the rental market, especially for pet-friendly pets, has just shrunk incredibly,” she said, adding that the task of finding a new space has caused her a great deal of stress. Martin is not alone. The city has an average vacancy rate of just one percent for all property types, and has seen a nearly 29 percent increase in rental prices since early 2022, according to Hope Street Management. Shamon Kureshi, president and CEO of Hope Street Management, says he has worked in the rental business for 43 years and has never seen vacancies so low. “Properties are being rented out faster than I have ever seen them rented. Rents are rising and vacancy rates are falling. There are definitely a lot of nervous tenants out there,” he said. For example, he says, a house in the northwest of the city could have been rented for $ 2,000 a month a year ago. This house is now rented for $ 3,400 to someone who snatched it in 12 hours, did not even go to see the property and is still living abroad. Single-family homes with up to three bedrooms are among the most difficult to lock, staying on the market for just four days, on average, he said. Shamon Kureshi is President and CEO of Hope Street Management. (Mark Matulis / CBC) “Landlords know there’s definitely a crisis and a rental crisis going on right now. If there might be a shortage of hamburgers, then we can just eat hot dogs, and it’s a little inconvenient, but it’s okay and no one is really “very upset,” he said.
“But when there is a shortage of rental housing, people die and no one wants that. No landlord, no tenant, no defense team, no one.”

‘Perfect storm’

“It’s a perfect storm in the sense that there are a lot of micro-factors that all work together at the same time. And there doesn’t really seem to be a factor that springs up,” Kureshi said. One of those factors is the boom in Alberta’s real estate market, he said. There are many homeowners who have seen that they can quickly sell their property and make a big profit. “The problem is, in many cases, that it removes the property from the rental pool,” he said.
Gerry Baxter, executive director of the Calgary Residential Rental Association, also says the low vacancy rates and high rental rates are due to a number of factors. This house in northwest Calgary was snatched within 12 hours by someone who is not even in the country. (Mark Matulis / CBC) “A lot of people left during COVID and the recession. People are starting to come back now. We have new industries coming to Calgary, the technology industries, which are also attracting a lot of people. So all these people have somewhere to live. “, he said. For the past eight years, rental rates have been relatively stable, he said, while costs for landlords have risen – including utility bills and property taxes. “Now we see as a result of shortages in the supply chain, we now see that some of the service companies, that the transactions that are usually used by the owners now charge more for their services and the spare parts are becoming more expensive,” he said. All these costs are borne by the tenants.
“It’s not like any other business. When your costs go up, you can only absorb so much of it before you have to transfer it. And in the case of the rental industry, when it is passed on, it is passed on to tenants in the form of rent increases.”