WATERLOO — The City of Waterloo is the Canadian capital for off-campus housing built specifically for students. And the competition isn't even close.

More than 40 per cent of all purpose-built student housing bedrooms in this country are located in Waterloo — predominantly in the Northdale neighbourhood — and much of that housing stock is owned by just a handful of developers, according to a new study.

"I suspected Waterloo was ... head and shoulders above the rest, but I don't know if I thought it was head, shoulders and also maybe torso ahead of the rest," said researcher Nick Revington, a University of Waterloo PhD student in the school of planning.

According to Revington's research, there were 17,567 purpose-built student housing beds in Waterloo last year. That's 42 per cent of the 41,786 beds in the entire country.

His findings were published in late November in the paper "Making a market for itself: The emergent financialization of student housing in Canada."

His research began when he moved to Waterloo in 2015 after studying geography and urban studies at Concordia University in Montreal. The Guelph native was shocked by the scale of student-oriented development around UW and Wilfrid Laurier University.

Just how dominant is Waterloo's position? London was second on the list with just under 4,100 beds, followed by Montreal with 2,206. Kitchener was No. 11 with 1,016 beds.

"People locally just think this is happening everywhere else, and people everywhere else don't fully realize what's happening in Waterloo," Revington said.

The units are also becoming increasingly concentrated among a handful of owners. Five developers or landlords own 24 per cent of all of the units in Waterloo, Revington found.

Last year, Prica Global Enterprises (which operates local rental management companies Accommod8u and KW4Rent) topped the list with 3,250 beds in the city.

That concentration of ownership is one of the major take-aways from the study for Waterloo Coun. Jeff Henry. His ward is home to the two universities, the Northdale neighbourhood and the majority of the student population.

"The extent of concentration is interesting. Trying to grapple with whether or not it's having a positive or negative impact on our market is a good question," he said.

Purpose-built student accommodations is a massive global industry that has just recently started to emerge in Canada. In 2016, more than US$16 billion was invested in the sector globally. From 2013 to 2016 Canada attracted less than US$200 million of that investment, Revington found.

In Waterloo, a converging set of factors has driven large-scale construction in and around Northdale.

It's a university town with two post-secondary institutions right next to each other, it's close to Toronto, and the city's 2012 Northdale plan explicitly calls for the redevelopment of single-family homes into multistorey residential units, Revington said.

The buildup has also contributed to gentrification (or "studentification" as it's called in the paper) and age segregation as older residents leave or are pushed out, the study found. Builders are particularly fond of student housing because they tend to charge more per bed than traditional rental housing.

Revington warned there could be negative repercussions for having finance-driven developments dominate the city's skyline.

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"There are risks to that when we start building our cities from the perspective of purely making money, rather than a careful consideration of what we need and want in the city," he said.

And there is some concern the Northdale community as a whole may be leaning too heavily toward large student housing units. In 2015, the city's town and gown committee submitted a report to council warning about the potential for student housing vacancies in coming years.

At the time, Waterloo already had a surplus of about 1,200 beds, and an estimated 7,000 new beds were expected to be built over the coming years.

Slowing or declining student enrolment is also a looming possibility that could lead to empty bedrooms. In 2018, Laurier said enrolment had dropped by about 15 per cent, while UW enrolment was up by about five per cent.

Henry said the Northdale redevelopment plan is designed to shift development away from four- and five-bedroom student apartments to one- and two-bedroom units that could be used by students as well as young professionals or even older residents looking to downsize.

"Part of the Northdale plan is to ensure development meets multiple demographics," he said.

Student housing has been a topic of considerable debate in recent months after a group claiming to be student tenants illegally accessed thousands of Prica's digital maintenance requests and posted the information online.

Revington doesn't think the concentration of ownership in Waterloo is necessarily the cause of these student complaints. A lack of tenants understanding their rights is likely more of a problem.

"You see many of these same complaints in other university cities," he said. "The fact there are a few large players in Waterloo makes it easy to portray one or two of them as the villain."

jjackson@therecord.com

Twitter: @JamesDEJ