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.

On Monday, RioCan REIT announced its new residential brand: RioCan Living. This is the group that will now be responsible for redeveloping the 43 properties within their portfolio that they have identified as having intensification potential. Here’s how they are describing the new brand: “RioCan Living delivers best in class purpose-built rental units and condos along Canada’s most prominent public transit lines.”

It has been interesting watching RioCan over the last 6 months. In the fall they announced that they would be selling off somewhere around $1.5 billion of their portfolio to rebalance toward Canada’s six largest markets, and in particular the Toronto market. And with this recent unveiling it is clear that they are doubling down on transit-oriented mixed-use communities as a way to future-proof their retail portfolio against disruption.

Major markets. High-density. Transit-oriented. This shouldn’t surprise any of you. Here is a link to their latest investor presentation in case you’re curious.

The New York Times recently published “a portrait of new single-family homes” in the US in 2016. Here’s that portrait:

For those of those living in dense urban centers, this portrait is perhaps a reminder that in many other places a large single-family home can be had for about the price of a studio apartment.

Nothing in the above portrait likely surprised you, but it’s interesting to note that over half of all new single family homes delivered last year were in “The South.” Only 7% were built in the dense northeast.

The New York Times also recently looked at “international rents per square foot” using data from RentCafe. Here they are:

New York City sits at the top with an average rent of $4.98 psf. This is across all boroughs. I am surprised by how low some of these international rents are. But averages rarely tell you the whole story.

In any event, I do think that these two graphics start to speak to the economic spikiness that we are seeing across the US.