Image: Kurt Bauschardt, Flickr
The average rent in Kelowna didn’t continue its downward trend this month but remained below its February high point.
The PadMapper Canadian Rent Report shows the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the city in June is $1,140 a month. That’s a minor jump from the previous $1,120 a month, and represents a return to rising rent prices in the city.
After going steadily up for more than a year and topping out at $1,160 a month in February, rent in Kelowna had fallen every month up until June’s small jump.
For the first time in well over a year, the average price of a two-bedroom rental in the city also went down, now sitting at $1,620 a month.
With Kelowna’s housing market starting to soften after a red-hot 2017, more relief for renters might be on the way.
A recent report from Royal LePage showed average home prices in British Columbia falling this year, despite a healthy housing market in the rest of Canada.
The report suggests that means the provincial government’s “speculation tax” is working, causing many Albertans to sell off or rent out their vacation homes in the province and bringing more rentals onto the market.
Last year, developers in Kelowna also started construction on a record number of homes in Kelowna, with the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation recording 3,577 total housing starts, 56 per cent of which were apartment rental units.
With some of those projects beginning to finish more rental stock is being added in the city all the time.
Numbers from the PadMapper report appear to support the idea that Kelowna’s rent will continue to go down. While average rent in Kelowna did go up slightly, the rise in rent was more modest than in many other Canadian cities—especially it’s year-over-year average.
Kelowna remained in 10th place on PadMapper’s list of the country’s most expensive cities to rent in.
Meanwhile, Vancouver and Toronto remain at one and two on PadMapper’s most expensive rental city list, far above any other cities.
The average one-bedroom rental cost Vancouver renters $2,090 a month in June, while Toronto’s one-bedroom renters paid an average of $2,070.
The cheapest of the 26 Canadian cities PadMapper tracked last month was Saguenay, Quebec, where the average one-bedroom rental cost $680 a month.
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