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For anyone thinking of moving to Yellowknife in 2023, understanding what’s going on in our local rental market is pretty important. There is no one source for this information that is perfect, but CMHC’s annual Northern Housing Report is the most important piece of the puzzle. CBC North reported on the new 2022 edition this morning. Here is the link to the article and here is the link to the full CMHC report. To sum up the report, the vacancy rate for Yellowknife rental apartments and townhouses was 1.8% in 2021, which was down from 3.6% in 2020. That’s a pretty low vacancy rate, but it’s actually pretty normal for Yellowknife. For context, from 2007 to 2012 we averaged 1.9% vacancy. Our 1.8% rate is also higher than both Whitehorse and Iqaluit, which are both at 0.8% vacancy right now. And, most importantly for those thinking of moving here, things are about to get much, much better.
Before I get into what’s coming down the pike it is important to mention the shortcomings of the CMHC report. First of all, it doesn’t tell us much about what’s happening right now because the report is already a year out of date on the day it is released. And the second issue is that CMHC has no way of including individually-owned rental condos and townhomes in their survey. But, that said, we can fill in some of the gaps with anecdotal information available around town.
If you dig a bit deeper into CMHC’s data tables you’ll discover that at the end of 2021, there were only 1,750 rental apartments and 299 rental townhouses in all of Yellowknife (excluding condominium units rented out privately, as previously mentioned). That means that 1.8% vacancy amounts to 31.5 apartments and 5.4 townhouses available for rent. That’s not a lot.
But it also means that when one development group adds 184 rental apartment units to the market over a 2-year period, as Mike and Milan Mrdjenovich are in the process of doing, it completely changes the situation. On the day those units become available, they could potentially increase the apartment vacancy rate from 1.8% to 12.3%. And by anyone’s standards, 12.3% vacancy would represent a glut of apartments.
That’s not exactly how things will work of course, because there is probably a lot of overcrowding and sharing of rental units around town. So when new units come on the market, renters spread out and immediately absorb some of the vacancy. But regardless, 184 units over two years is a huge chunk.
And there are other developments around town, some already underway and others in the planning stages, that will have an impact as well:
- West Bay condominiums added 24 units to the market last month
- Lynn’s Place II, currently under construction, will add 21 units of affordable rental housing in 2023
- The Avens expansion and will add 102 units of seniors housing to the market – not a perfect correlation to the rental market, but still important to consider.
- The Stanton legacy project will add 90 long-term and extended-care beds (same asterisk as Avens)
- The vacant Bellanca building is slated to be converted to 72 rental apartments. The new development will be called the Nest
- Holloway Lodgings is proposing to build 180 units of rental housing on the 50/50 lot in the centre of our downtown
If we exclude the seniors’ units from the list above, that’s still 481 rental apartment units being added to a city with only 1,750 units – an increase of over a quarter. That’s a massive change in our rental market.
But there are still a couple pieces missing from the picture. There are zero townhouses and very few three-bedroom apartments including on the list above. I believe this is why the Aurora College transformation team is talking about building three-bedroom apartments on Tin Can Hill (the location of the new Polytechnic University campus). I haven’t included those units on my list above, because they are too far down the road to matter much to people looking to rent in 2023, but they still matter in terms of the long-term picture, which seems pretty healthy.
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