Yesterday Urbanation released its Q2-2018 rental report for the Greater Toronto Area. It tracks both purpose-built rentals and condominium rentals, the latter being condominium units that are listed for rent on MLS. The average condo rent, for all unit types across the GTA, is up 11.2% year-over-year to a face rent of $2,302 per month.

Here is a chart from the Globe and Mail:

The former City of Toronto, which includes downtown, is actually up 13.5%:

But here are the stats that I really wanted to draw your attention to today (figures from the Globe).

According to Urbanation, there were some 384,000 condo apartments in the Greater Toronto Area in 2017 and nearly 1/3 of them were rented out. Given that the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation pegs the total number of rental apartments in the GTA at approximately 311,596, condo apartments represent about 40% of all our rental housing stock.

So condo buildings are actually doing quite a bit of heavy lifting when it comes to providing rental housing in this region.

Last week the US Census Bureau released its 2017 population estimates for the largest cities in the country. All of the figures are for the city itself and not the broader MSA or some other boundary.

Here are the top 15 cities with the largest numeric increases between July 1, 2016 and July 1, 2017:

However, if we switch over to percentage increases, Frisco, Texas – which is part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area – jumps up to number one with an increase of 8.2%. 

In fact, the top 3 cities (on percentage basis) are in Texas and 10 of the top 15 cities are located in the South. That shouldn’t come as a surprise to many of you. Related post: Follow the sun and sprawl.

However, if we only consider the 25 largest cities in the US, the fastest growing city on a percentage basis was Seattle at 2.47%. Number two was Fort Worth at 2.18%. And number three was Charlotte at 1.84%.

New York City sits at 0.08%. And Detroit lost people. But it’s not a horrible figure (-0.35%). For more tables and data, click here.

Teralytics recently looked at data from 500,000 smartphone users to determine how, when, and where Puerto Ricans moved between August 2017 and February 2018 during and following Hurricane Maria – generally considered to be the worst natural disaster on record for the area. 

CityLab published the data here and along with the following maps:

It shows the locations and the top 10 counties that received Puerto Rican population during the above time period. Florida and the Northeast are at the top of list, which isn’t all that surprising. Privacy concerns aside, it is once again an example of the kind of granular data that we now have access to. Prior to this data being available, all we apparently had was estimates.