Montreal City Weblog

Kate 13:12 on 2025-04-09 Permalink Reply  

• Blork 14:05 on 2025-04-09 Permalink

  I don’t think I’ve ever seen an article about rent that hasn’t been a bog of statistical maybes. For example, all these articles that say the average rent for a 1BR apartment in Montreal is $1500 are only drawing from a curated list of availabilities — which are almost all for new (or newish) construction apartments as far as I know. It doesn’t include the rents that people on average are actually paying, or the ones that are advertised privately, or are advertised in outlets that are not part of the curated list.

  That doesn’t mean rents are not high; just that the media articles are at best generally indicative and shouldn’t be taken literally.

  Same with this article. There is no way anyone’s rent has actually gone down. What’s happening is the pool of advertised vacancies collectively show, on average, a slight decrease. There are many possible reasons for this, and the most likely is that the pool of advertised vacancies has expanded. Maybe they are tapping more sources now, or maybe a bunch of long-term leases with lower rent have recently been given up.

  The main thing is that if you were looking for an apartment two months ago, and the guy standing next to you is looking now, you will both have seen a range of apartments and a range of rents, but the guy next to you is seeing — on average — rents a tiny bit lower. On average. Which is to say mathematically when adding them up and averaging them. It is not to say any given apartment’s rent has come down.

• roberto 07:41 on 2025-04-10 Permalink

  The push for building new housing will decreasing housing scarcity and keep rents lower. This isn`t a maybe. I`m not sure why the federal campaigns don`t add this to their `home buiding` campaigns. It`s an easy added value and not a ‘maybe’.

• Joey 12:08 on 2025-04-10 Permalink

  @roberto – I think politicians feel they have to tread carefully; the same market forces that you describe (more housing = lower rents) theoretically also reduce the value of someone’s home (more housing = lower housing prices). As much as you want to be seen as acting to keep reduce the burden on tenants, you also don’t want to be the politician who promised to reduce the value of people’s houses, which (like it or not) is probably most homeowners’ principal long-term investment.

  @blork – all true, but a couple of things. First, in the absence of a rental registry, there isn’t very much data about the trends in rental prices, so journalists/analysts are stuck with whatever data is available. I imagine StatCan collectes and reports on housing trends, including rent, but they probably don’t report frequently enough to do this kind of trend assessment. Second, and perhaps more importantly, taking the angle of only looking at what’s currently available is obviously not comprehensive, but it is instructive if the social/policy problem we’re concerned with is how individuals can navigate the current market. If you were looking for an apartment, it wouldn’t matter to you that the occupied units in a building are rented at $X – you’re only interested in what the rent on an unoccupied unit is. So, yes, the average rent of all apartments is probably lower than the average rent of available apartments, but the trend we’re interested in keeping an eye on is really about the latter and not the former. To come back to your example, what’s important to take away is that it’s a (very) little easier for the guy looking now to find an affordable apartment. (Also, the article really doesn’t imply that individual rents are going down, only that the average of available units has diminished. I really don’t think we can fault the newspaper here for being misleading…)

• MarcG 12:19 on 2025-04-10 Permalink

  Similarly to how childhood deaths have a big impact on average life expectancy, a single terrible apartment available for cheap could bring the average price down significantly depending on the size of the dataset.