BC Liberal Leader Kevin Falcon thinks more needs to be done to address surging rental prices — in Burnaby and across the province — as more people turn to renting instead of buying as interest rates continue to rise.
Rentals.ca's December stats show Burnaby still boasts the third highest price for rent in all of Canada with a one-bedroom averaging $2,304, while a two-bedroom is inching closer to $3,000 at $2,968.
Those are increases of 0.6 and 2.2 per cent respectively from November.
Vancouver continues to be number one with a single bedroom at an average of $2,633 and two bedrooms at $3,598.
In a wide-ranging interview with Glacier Media journalists today (Jan. 11), the current opposition leader believed Premier David Eby and the NDP government need to be able to nurture new investments into the marketplace while also not penalizing current landlords for making investments into their existing product.
"The problem is, this [current] government makes it worse because what they do is they then say, 'Okay, now we're going to make sure that we continue with really restrictive rent controls that absolutely will guarantee that there's not going to be new capital and new investment into the rental housing market.' And that's a problem because we need a lot more rental housing being built. And the problem is they literally made it so that no new capital is going to go into market rental," Falcon said.
"And the reason why you need that is even when you build new stuff, a lot of people say, 'Oh yeah, but that new stuff, who can afford it, it'll be expensive rent,' but they don't understand that there is a knockoff effect.
"Every time you bring new supply into the market, you get people that are sometimes in the older supply, but their income goes up over the years, and they say, 'Hey, I'd like to move into that new place,' and they do. And that creates an opening in the older place, and then more people move in there. And it sort of works its way through the market."
While the costs of rentals continue to climb, housing prices are still dropping as mortgage rates also continue to increase.
The Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver's (REBGV) December report said 28,903 homes were sold last year across the region, which marks a 34.3 per cent decrease from 2021 when there were 43,999 recorded sales.
Last year's numbers were also 13.4 per cent below the 10-year sales average.
Locally, a residential property in Burnaby East last month recorded a benchmark price of $1,082,300 (-2.3 per cent compared to November 2022), $965,300 in Burnaby North (-1.7 per cent) and $1,057,400 in Burnaby South (+0.2 per cent).
Single-family detached hit a benchmark price of $1,675,400 in Burnaby East (-5.1 per cent), $1,889,600 in Burnaby North (-1.7 per cent) and $2,038,900 in Burnaby South (+0.5 per cent).
Townhouse prices also dropped in two of the three REBGV Burnaby areas with Burnaby East at $854,000 (-0.3 per cent), Burnaby North at $860,800 (-0.1 per cent) and Burnaby South at $948,300 (+0.4 per cent).
