Melfort is keeping a close eye on its rental housing market.
“We’ve been monitoring this very closely for over five years now,” said Brent Lutz, the city’s community development manager.
“When we first had a study concerning housing needs throughout the region here and recognized that there was a shortage of rental inventory in the community,” he said, “since that time, we’ve seen a fair bit of construction, because that was our hope was to create the units to help meet that need.”
Five years ago, there were 469 units in purpose-built rental buildings that had at least three units. Now, there are 559 – an increase of almost 100 rental units. These figures don’t include duplexes, condos or an individual renting out their home.
The City’s annual rental survey occurs every February, and data from the most recent survey was not available by press time.
“We contact all the property management companies we’re aware of that offer rental property in town to determine what has happened with the vacancy rate and whether they’re finding more properties sitting vacant as a result of the new construction or as a result of changes in the local economy, etc,” said Lutz.
“The information that we had the last time we surveyed the rental property owners is that their units continue to remain full, that they have not really seen any increase of vacancy in their properties,” he said.
“We do see a bit more turnover now than we did, say, five years ago, when people wouldn’t even move out of a place because there was nowhere else to go.”
The bump of nearly 100 units hasn’t solved Melfort’s shortage, however.
“We certainly still have a shortage in the community. We can’t really speculate as to how many people are looking, all we know is that there’s nothing for them to look for.”
Lutz described a common occurrence in the city:
“People that have money fill up from the top down and will take the best they can from what they have available. Eventually, the inventory is all used up and those that are still left holding some money, looking for something to rent, will have nowhere to go.”
Lutz said it appears that rental prices are remaining static.
Despite incentives for new unit development, there aren’t any apartment buildings in construction in Melfort right now. Lutz said there’s usually about two years between projects.
Once a multi-unit property is built, “other investors will kind of hold back to see just exactly how those are filled up, do any of them sit vacant and how long does it take.”
Lutz is hoping to see interest in multi-unit projects in the coming year.
