The number of short-term rentals in Canada has grown sharply since 2017, with units that could be considered usable for long-term housing growing even faster, a new Statistics Canada report said on Tuesday.
According to the report, the total number of short-term rental units in Canada grew by 60 per cent between 2017 and 2023. The number of units considered ‘potential long-term dwellings’ (PLTDs) – or units that could be long-term housing – rose by 80 per cent.
In 2017, there were 58,441 short-term rental units that could be considered potential long-term dwellings. By the end of 2023, this number had risen to 107,266, the report said. In 2017, potential long-term dwellings made up 27.2 per cent of all short-term rentals. By 2023, this share was 30.2 per cent.
The report describes potential long-term dwellings as entire housing units being listed for more than 180 days. This does not include vacation-type properties.
However, the trend was not linear and was broken by the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Total short-term listings fell by 19.2 per cent from 2019 to 2021. Potential long-term dwellings listed for short-term use fell even more sharply, with a 28.1 per cent drop.
The report said this was due to a decline in tourism activity.
“After the decline in tourism during the pandemic, many property owners may have converted their STRs to long-term rentals. This could also explain why 2022 marked a low point in the proportion of PLTDs, since many thousands of units may have still been tied up in 12-month leases during the onset of the recovery,” the report said.
The report said this activity “may support the notion that these units could be used as long-term dwellings.”
The report said Canada had 15.5 million housing units at the end of 2023. Nationally, potential long-term dwellings accounted for 0.69 per cent of the total housing stock in Canada, which is an all-time high for Canada. The share is rising across several provinces.
In Ontario, for example, the share of housing units more than doubled from 0.35 per cent in 2022 to 0.69 per cent in 2023. In Quebec, there was a jump from 0.38 per cent in 2022 to 0.51 per cent in 2023. In both British Columbia and Prince Edward Island, this share exceeded one per cent.
The share of potential long-term dwellings in the total housing stock was significantly higher in tourist areas. For example, in Whistler, B.C., potential long-term dwellings made up 35 per cent of the total housing stock.
A spokesperson for Airbnb said the number of potentially long-term homes was a small percentage of the total housing stock.
“Despite some concerns with the methodology used, as the report concludes, the number of short-term rentals that could be used as a potential long-term home is less than one percent of the overall number of homes in Canada – a small fraction of the 22 million homes needed by 2030 to achieve affordability,” Nathan Rotman, policy lead in Canada for Airbnb, told Global News in a statement.
Rotman said restricting short-term rentals would not solve the housing crisis.
While the share of potential long-term dwellings as a share of Canada’s housing stock may appear low, John Pasalis, Realtor and broker at Realosophy Realty, said the absolute numbers also tell a story.
“There are over 100,000 short-term rentals that could have been used as homes for families,” he said.
He said this number is very high for a country where annual housing starts barely exceed 200,000. According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, housing starts in centres with a population over 100,000 declined nationally from 240,590 in 2022 to 223,513 in 2023.
Pasalis said this speaks to a philosophical question in housing policy: is housing an investment or a right?
“These units are being used as standalone hotel rooms for investor profit rather than as housing,” he said. “We (in Canada) value investor profit over housing.”