A recent ad for an apartment for rent in Whistler Village is generating some attention online.
The Craigslist ad, which has since been deleted, lists a one-bedroom condo in Whistler Village for $6,000 a month.
The condo sleeps five people and includes cable, Wi-Fi, a parking stall and bi-weekly professional housekeeping service. It did not include hydro.
It is 550 square feet with one queen bed in the bedroom, a queen pull-out couch and a double pull-out couch.
Patrick Kelly with the Whistler Real Estate Company said he has not seen a one-bedroom apartment for rent for $6,000 a month before.
“It would certainly be very high by our standards for a long-term tenant, for sure,” he said.
“It’s not shocking for somebody looking to come and ski for a month, for 30 days, or for 45 days, to be paying $150 or $175 a day to do that.”
However, the ad clearly stated a minimum three-month to one-year lease was requested.
Kelly said rental housing in Whistler is in short supply.
“We obviously have the added challenge of seasonal tenants coming into the area and seasonal visitors who want to spend the ski season here so it does make it very much make it a market where the needle is in favour of the landlord,” he said.
“I’m not sure that we’ve reached rents that I’ve heard about down in Yaletown, but I have to admit I’m not overly familiar with the rental market down in Vancouver. But certainly, a two-bedroom apartment can easily be $2,500 a month here. One-bedrooms, $1,500 to $2,000. And that depends on location of facilities.”
He said Whistler, like most communities in southern B.C., is experiencing a lack of affordable rental properties.
Kelly said on average, Whistler property owners saw their assessment increase by about 26 per cent last year.
“It is a fairly nuanced market and I think one of the common misconceptions people have about Whistler is that it’s a very large market,” he said. “It’s a very high-profile market but I don’t know it’s a very large market. We only do about 850 transactions a year so it does create a bit of volatility statistics.”
He said the average transaction value now is just over $1 million.
Sales were down in Whistler last year from a historical high.
“The physical size of our market doesn’t grow a whole lot. We’ve had five continuous years of pretty good demand, prices have gone up and the number of properties have gone down so we do have a lot of support for evaluation here because there just isn’t a lot of things to buy,” said Kelly.
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