One in eight Vancouver condos sits empty: report

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) –  One in eight condos is unoccupied in the Vancouver, according to a new report on unoccupied homes in the city.

Looking at 225,000 homes over a 12-year period, Vancouver start-up Ecotagious determined 4.8 per cent of homes in the city are unoccupied. The findings are based on anonymous power usage data from smart meters, provided by BC Hydro.

When you look even closer at the individual categories, condos are the most likely to be vacant, with 12.5 per cent of them not lived in.

This means there are around 10,000 vacant homes in the city. To put that in perspective, that’s about two to three years’ worth of construction.

The report concludes these vacancy figures are consistent with other Canadian cities.

It found the residential vacancy was at 4.9 per cent in 2002, almost identical to the numbers from 2014.

In a statement, Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson points out that although the data shows the percentage of empty homes has remained stagnant, it has gone up over the last 12 years.

“It’s unacceptable that so many homes are left empty at a time so many of our residents are struggling to find appropriate housing. Housing needs to be first and foremost for people to live in, not to be treated as a commodity,” says Robertson.

He says he wrote to the premier last summer, asking for the province to give them tools to discourage discourage homes from staying empty for long periods of time. “We are still looking forward to a response on this issue. I would hope that with the release of today’s information, that the BC government will work with us and other municipalities in Metro Vancouver to deal with this issue.”

Robertson adds in the throne speech and budget last month, the BC government said that the way to deal with housing affordability is to increase supply. “Reducing the number of empty homes would be one way to do that.”

Moving forward, the city plans to do this same study every two years.

Premier Christy clark says a fix for the rental problem should be coming soon.

“We have heard a range of different options, a range of different ideas a lot of which are good. [The] Ministry of Finance is right now and has been for the last little while, really drilling down to understand which of the solutions that have come forward are going to be the best ones,” she explains. “There should be more rental options for people. There’s two ways to do that. One is through zoning, the city has complete control of that. The other is through some tax changes and other regulatory changes the province can make so we need to be partners in it.”

She says everyone is concerned about the rental problem.