Manitoba’s rental market rises, home ownership shrinks

Source: Winnipeg Free Press

Manitoba’s rental market is growing as the rate of home ownership shrinks, according to Canada’s 2021 census.
The prairie province’s number of tenant households has jumped 23 per cent from 2011 to 2021, new Statistics Canada data revealed Wednesday. Meantime, home ownership in Manitoba fell from 70.1 per cent to 67.4.
In 2016, the latest census before last year’s, 68.7 per cent of Manitobans owned homes.
“Why aren’t we helping some of these newcomers… and the younger demographic find a way to get into home ownership?” said Peter Squire, the Winnipeg Regional Real Estate Board’s head of market intelligence.
Manitoba follows a national trend — across Canada, home ownership has declined and rentals have risen. Only the Northwest Territories saw an increase in home ownership over the past decade.
Rentals comprised 43.4 per cent of new builds in Winnipeg from 2016 to 2021. It exceeds the Canadian average of 40.4 per cent.
Squire believes exemptions on Manitoba land transfer taxes for first-time home buyers would open the gates of ownership to more people.
“Millennials in particular have a very strong preference to become homeowners at some time in their life,” he said. “(Land transfer taxes can) become a real impediment for people.”
Nationally, the share of Canadians aged 25 through 29 owning homes has decreased — 36.5 per cent in 2021, compared to 44.1 per cent in 2011 — as has the chunk of those in the 30 to 34 age range (52.3 per cent were home owners in 2021, down from 59.2 per cent in 2011).
Prairie homeowners reported expecting home value growth of 2.2 per cent, when compared to 2016 valuations. It’s the slowest reported growth in the nation. Expected home values grew 59.4 per cent in Ontario, 36.3 per cent in British Columbia and 29.8 per cent in Quebec.
“We’ve been quite stable (house price wise) up until last year, where we did see that spike,” Squire said. “Things are settling down again as we head into the last quarter of 2022.”
Locally, home prices seemed to skyrocket during the pandemic, but “that was nowhere near what you were seeing in some other… markets across the country,” Squire said.
Fewer Manitoban households were spending 30 per cent or more of their income on shelter in 2021, compared to five years earlier — 17.3 per cent were last year, dipping from 19.1 per cent in 2016.
Winnipeg’s condominium occupancy trails Canada’s average. In 2021, 9.7 per cent of Winnipeggers lived in condos, compared to the national average of 15 per cent.
Ten million Canadian households own their homes, according to Statistics Canada’s release Wednesday. The country’s growth in rental households (21.5 per cent) more than doubled growth in owner households (8.4 per cent) from 2011 to 2021.
Canada’s home ownership rate last year was 66.5 per cent.