Kelowna's still in the $2,000-a-month-rent club.
Although median monthly rent for a typical one-bedroom apartment in the city dipped slightly in September, it remains at a milestone $2,000.
The figures come from Zumper, the online platform that lists apartments for rent and compiles the monthly Canadian Rent Report.
"Kelowna is ranked as the 6th most expensive rental market in the nation last month with prices ofn one and two-bedrooms settling at medians of $2,000 and $2,530, respectively," said Zumper's associate director of communications Crystal Chen.
"Notably, the price of one bedrooms in Kelowna is up 7.5% since this time last year."
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That's right, one-bed rents are on a tear in the city and made big news last month when, for the first time ever, broke the $2,000 a month barrier to sit at a record-high $2,010 in August.
September's $2,000 a month may be just off the record, but it's still high, unaffordable to many and keeps Kelowna in the realm of the priciest in Canada.
Only five cities in the nation have heftier one-bed rents -- Vancouver at $2,650, Toronto with $2,450, Burnaby at $2,430, Victoria with $2,150 and Halifax at $2,100.
It's interesting that Kelowna apartment rents are near record highs, while home prices in the city are down about 10% from record highs set in the spring of 2022.
The reality is that renters can't afford to move from an apartment to home ownership as quickly as they did in the past because home prices are still steep in Kelowna -- just over $1 million for a single-family home, $725,000 for a townhouse and $505,000 for a condominium.
Thus, renters stay in apartments longer, creating less turnover, keeping availability low and demand high all while driving up rents.
The apartment vacancy rate in Kelowna is 1.3%, which means for every 100 apartments in the city only 1.3 of them are available for rent any given month.
On top of that, Kelowna has always been a desirable place to live, work, play and invest, so people are constantly moving here to work or retire and they need a place to live.
University and college students are also in the mix in the demand for rentals.
High rents also contribute to other trends such as young adults continuing to live at home with their parents because they can't afford their own apartment, having roommates when you don't particularly want to because it's the only way to afford rent and people paying more than the recommended one-third of their pay on housing because rents are sky high.
Zumper's report focuses on one-bedroom rents and bases most of its rankings on it.
But it does also track median monthly rents for typical two-bedroom apartments.
In September, in Kelowna, that was $2,530, up from $2,450 in August, but still $170 off the record-high $2,700 it was in September 2022.
That also makes Kelowna the 6th most expensive city in the country to rent a two-bed.
The five pricest are Vancouver at $3,730, Burnaby with $3,130, Toronto at $3,100, Victoria with $2,850 and Halifax at $2,640.
The cheapest one and two-bed rents in Canada are found in Saskatoon ($1,300 and $1,490), Regina ($1,300 and $1,550), Windsor ($1,400 and $1,650), Edmonton ($1,430 and $1,690) and Quebec City ($1,460 and $1,620).
