Victoria remains a city of renters, and No. 2 on the list of Canadian cities with the fewest homeowners, according to numbers from Statistics sa国际传媒.
Compiled by online real estate blog Point2Homes, the numbers show Victoria hasn’t changed much over the past 16 years, with homeowners making up 39 per cent of the population in 2016. It was 38 per cent in 2001.
Only Montreal had fewer homeowners, at 37 per cent, while Vancouver had a homeownership rate of 47 per cent in 2016 and was ranked third.
It’s down to the geographic reality of the city, said Victoria Real Estate Board president Kyle Kerr. “The city of Victoria is a small, dense area,” he said. “The design of the city and downtown offers more apartments and condos, more densified properties which work for university students and service industry workers. The makeup of the city of Victoria is geared to rentable situations.”
Kerr said when you look around the region, the numbers change significantly in places such as Langford, which has close to 80 per cent homeowners, and Saanich, at more than 70 per cent.
Kerr said that is because there is more land which makes the cost of home ownership more affordable “And it allows [the municipalities] to offer more diverse options of housing,” Kerr said. “If we want to encourage more home ownership we need to work down that path to densify.”
And right now, Kerr said, the region is missing a level of housing — townhomes, duplexes and triplexes — seen in other centres. “That middle segment of property that would allow more people to get into home ownership and out of rentals,” he said.
Kerr said the measures designed to cool down hot real estate markets and moderate prices — new mortgage rules, taxes and restrictions — can often work against home ownership.
“The people that affects the most are entry-level people who want to be homeowners,” he said.
According to Point2Homes, nationwide home ownership rates dropped in 88 of the country’s largest 100 centres, the first time in more than 45 years.
In sa国际传媒, the rate, according to Statistics sa国际传媒’s 2016 numbers, was 68 per cent, a slight increase from 66.3 per cent in 2001, though down from the 70 per cent recorded in 2011.
Nanaimo saw one of the biggest drops between 2011 and 2016, as its home ownership rate dropped 5.9 percentage points to 68 per cent, placing it behind only Waterloo, Ont., for the largest decline since 2011. Waterloo dropped 7.2 points to 69 per cent.
According to Point2Homes, the change is reflective of the economy as a whole.
The blog suggested the slowdown in China’s economy, felt around the world, the collapse of oil prices and the reduced demand for sa国际传媒’s natural resources played a role.
It said sa国际传媒’s slowdown in turn had an effect on wages and reduced the consumer’s purchasing power, while in some centres home prices continued to rise leading to the decline in homeownership rates.
