×
The Housing Situation in Montreal
It is getting more expensive to rent an apartment in Montreal. Rental rates are increasing, while vacancy rates appear to be changing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), the average rent was up 4.2 percent in 2020 at an $891 per month average across the island for all apartment sizes. It also reported the vacancy rate increased to 2.7 percent in 2020 from 1.5 percent the year before.
Housing advocates across the city and the province of Quebec say there needs to be more control over landlord’s rent increases to keep housing affordable. Olivia Dumas works with the Regroupement des comités logement et associations de locataires du Québec (RCLALQ), a coalition of housing committees which advocates for tenants’ rights across the province. She said they’re seeing an unprecedented number of calls seeking their services. Dumas attributes this to rent increases and a lack of available housing that has been growing over the past few years.
“In the city of Montreal there is an awareness that this is happening,” she said “There is a housing crisis and it has been spoken about and denounced.
Dumas said the main reason she sees rental prices going up is real estate speculation. She said low interest rates have driven more people who can't necessarily afford to do so to buy property. They then transfer the burden of the price onto the tenants by charging higher rents.
Dumas said her claim was supported by the fact that most of the cases being opened at the Tribunal administratif du logement (TAL) come from new owners trying to evict or sharply increase rent. The Quebec Landlords Association has been contacted to comment on this, but could not schedule an interview before the deadline. Should an interview take place, this site will be updated with their information.
In a document received through an Access to Information request, between 2018 and 2020 the TAL reported a decrease in Montreal in the number of appeals and complaints between tenants and landlords. Of the 27,249 requests made to the TAL in 2020, 4,382 were submitted by tenants and 11,186 were submitted by landlords. Just under 41 per cent of total complaints in 2020, or 11,139, were filed for non-payment of rent, while two per cent, or 542, were qualified as relaunched cases where the submitter was not specified. The TAL was also contacted to comment, but declined to do an interview.
Dumas also said she sees landlords raising the price on rent because there is less housing available.
“And so, when there’s less housing available, landlords feel like they can increase the rent,” she said. “Because when something is in demand and they have all these people lining up to see an apartment, why not jack up the price?”
While the RCLALQ sees more of a demand for housing based on anecdotal evidence, the CMHC reported that vacancy in Montreal actually increased last year. Lukas Jasmin-Tucci, a senior analyst in economics for the CMHC, said this increase could be attributed to the pandemic.
“Many of the rental properties in the city, particularly in the central areas, were rented by students who didn’t come to Montreal this year because of COVID,” he said.
Jasmin-Tucci also pointed out that while Montreal was locked down over the past year and a half, many people left to avoid the restrictions, which were stricter in the city than in other regions of the province.
The CMHC publishes data about the rental market in their annual Rental Market Report, as well as its Rental Market Survey Reliability Tables, where data can be broken down by neighbourhood for centres of more than 10,000 people. This data is collected by surveying a random sampling of building owners about their units’ vacancy, rent price and turnover rates. The CMHC has been making this data public since 2014.
The RCLALQ also performed their own study where they scraped the online classifieds website Kijiji between February and May 2020 for all housing ads that included the unit’s monthly rental price. From those numbers the RCLALQ calculated the average total cost to rent an apartment in Montreal was $1,258 per month. For a 5 ½-room unit, the average was $1,563 per month, while for a studio it was $935 per month. According to its 2020 rental market report, the CMHC calculated the average total cost to rent an apartment in Montreal was $891 per month. For a 5 ½-room unit it was $1,112 per month and for a studio it was $703 per month.
It is important to note these data sets were collected differently, which is why they yield different results. Jasmin-Tucci said the CMHC relies on the word of the survey’s respondents, and since the selection of the sample is random, the results could be less consistent from year to year. The CMHC data does say that rent in Montreal is increasing by 4.2 percent on average. The RCLALQ conducted its same study of Kijiji ads for 2021 and found rent had increased by eight per cent.
The TAL has a tool to determine what it sees to be a reasonable rent increase between yearly leases. This tool takes into account whether the building has any non-residential properties, the amount of tax the owner has paid on the building compared to the year before, as well as whatever it costs the owner to do repairs and maintain the utilities. This means rent increases can vary between properties. In an example calculation for 2021, in a residential property with three units, where the owner covers electricity, maintenance and management and spent $1,300 worth of repairs for the building, a unit that was rented for $750 per month last year and received $1,000 worth of repairs should be subject to a $13-per-month increase, or 1.7 per cent, for the next year.