Vernon's rental vacancy rate raises alarm with city councillor

Photo: City of Vernon

Vernon’s rental vacancy rate is “incredibly scary,” says a city councillor.

CMHC’s recent rental report shows Vernon has an extremely low rental vacancy rate of just 1%.

Coun. Kari Gares says that means the current backlog in rental units is likely to continue to increase because there isn’t enough inventory.

“Looking at these numbers, it tells us we need to … I don’t know how we do this, but we need to somehow encourage more development in multi-family,” she told council, Monday.

Her comments came in response to a report from economic development and tourism manager Kevin Poole.

“We have not had a rental market like that at 1% vacancy since 2008, so incredibly low,” says Poole.

“There’s a lot of interest in this region, a lot of people looking to move here, some are renting before they come or just entering the rental market altogether with high housing prices.”

Exacerbating the rental crunch, the region's residential real estate market has been extremely hot.

“I don’t think anyone would have predicted a rebound quite like we saw,” says Poole.

Sales volume in 2020 was up 31.1%. The North Okanagan – Predator Ridge to Enderby – had $1.27 billion in sales.

Poole says the city promotes the vacancy rate to the development community as “a true opportunity.”

“The challenge often is to find a large parcel of land. If you’re going to do 150-200 units, you need a large site to do that and there’s only so many with the financial backing in order to make that work as well,” he says.

One particular developer, he says, has been looking in Vernon for about five years to find a suitable property for purpose-built rentals.