MISSING DATA WARNING: My scraper was broken from September 19th until the end of the month due to some Craigslist website shuffling. I've compared against a few other sources, and the price measures are pretty consistent. I will not post the neighbhourhood breakdowns because of small samples.

September Real Estate Happenings

On September 6th, the Bank of Canada pulled the trigger, raising interest rates to a whopping 1%. People who have fixed mortgages won't feel anything until renewal, but variable rates have been affected. This boost also affects the 1.9M Canadians borrowing against their homes through HELOCs. It's not so bad though, considering that a .25% increase in interest rates results in only an extra $167 in interest payments for the average HELOC amount ($67,000).

In BC, our housing minister, as her first act, has strengthened the Residential Tenancy Branch (RTB) with additional funding. The RTB will receive an additional $7 million over the next three years. This funding will be used, in part, to open up 26 new positions; the most exciting being a position for innovation! There are also talks of "imminent" legislation aimed at closing the 1-year lease loophole allowing land lords to keep resetting rents to market rates. These are all small steps in the right direction, and I look forward to their full budget next February.

Finally, I came across an article about predicting rental prices in San Francisco. Eric Fisher, a resident of SF, tabulated rental prices in the city back to 1979. Then, he tried to find factors that could be used to predict rental prices. Apparently, rental prices can be accurately inferred from just 3 factors: the number of jobs, the number of existing units, and the local wages.

September Rental Stats

For the first 18 days of September, compared against the same period in other months, listings grew 54%. I'd be careful reading too much into this though due to data missing-ness. Volume growth is probably driven by turnover of yearly student leases. This turnover would also explain why there is no corresponding drop in price. In fact, rental prices are on their way up again as landlords keep testing what the markets will bear. Medians for one bedrooms broke the $2000 mark (+2.6% MoM), two bedrooms are now at $2750 (+5.8% MoM) and three bedrooms at $3000 (+1.7% MoM). Only studios have been stable at $1650.

Studios $1650 (+0%)

1 bedrooms $2000 (+2.6%)

2 bedrooms $2750 (+5.8%)

3 bedrooms $3000 (+1.7%)

That's it for September.

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