Rental housing in North Vancouver: part one
The City of North Vancouver will be discussing the creation of some affordable housing on East 1st Street at an upcoming Council meeting.
After reading the agenda for the meeting I remembered something that I quickly put together in November 2008. I had just attended one of the all-candidates' meetings, where one of the main topics of discussion was the lack of affordable housing in the City. I remember leaving the meeting wondering "how much do rental homes cost in North Vancouver?"
Knowing that probably the vast majority of rental homes are advertised on Craigslist, I wrote a little script to automatically download all rental advertisements for North Vancouver. I set it to run every four hours, planning to, in a few weeks, put together some summary numbers.
Of course, I soon forgot about it and am only getting to it now; here are a few graphs. Keep in mind that these show all rental homes, be they in apartments, basement suites, or elsewhere, and anywhere in the City or District of North Vancouver.
The first shows the number of advertisements per week from November 2008 to today. You'll notice a gap in the late summer/early fall of 2009 -- something stopped working with the script and so there is no data for that period.
You can see that while the number varied a bit, there were on average about a hundred advertisements per week. There's a marked increase recently, which may reflect additional inventory being released for the Olympics.
The second shows the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles for the monthly rents listed for these homes.
It's a bit more complicated, but shows that 25% of advertised 1-bedroom homes had a monthly rent of $925 or less. Since we know that there were usually about 100 homes advertised, that means that in any given week there's about 25 homes being advertised for $925 or less.
The median rent -- the number which 50% of homes had a lower rent and 50% had a higher rent, averaged $1,069.
And the value for the 75th percentile was $1,322. That means that, on average, 75% of 1-bedroom rental homes advertised rented for that amount or less.
I have similar data for 2 and 3-bedroom homes and once I get a bit of time I'll post it too.
