New data on housing tenure in Ottawa
How many homes are owner-occupied versus tenant-occupied?
This post is about data from Ottawa’s Vacant Unit Tax, but please put aside any strong opinions you may have about it. We won’t be debating it here today.
In 2023 and 2024, property owners in Ottawa had to make an online declaration to indicate their property status. The data from these declarations is giving us a really interesting look into housing tenure in Ottawa: How many homes are owner-occupied and how many are rented?
Take Stittsville. According to the declarations, we have 17,426 households as of April 30, 2024, not including purpose-built apartments. (Vacant Unit Tax declarations are only required for residential properties that contain six units or less.)
Preliminary data from 2024 Vacant Unit Tax Declarations, as of April 30, 2024.1
Overall 15.3% (2,659 out of 17,426) of Stittsville households are tenants. That number is a lot higher than I would have guessed. Townhomes are rented at nearly twice that rate: 30.2%.
Preliminary data from 2024 Vacant Unit Tax Declarations, as of April 30, 2024.
That high rate of townhome rentals is also apparent in other rapidly-growing suburbs. Here’s the data on tenure for townhomes across all wards.
Preliminary data from 2024 Vacant Unit Tax Declarations, as of April 30, 2024.
Home ownership versus home rental varies quite a bit as well from inside the Greenbelt to outside the Greenbelt. Here’s the data for tenure of single homes across Ottawa.
Preliminary data from 2024 Vacant Unit Tax Declarations, as of April 30, 2024.
According to 2024 VUT declaration data:
VUT declarations were made on 341,515 units in Ottawa.
66,247 of those units were tenant-occupied (19.4%)
247,689 of those units were owner-occupied (72.5%)
4,030 of those units were vacant (1.2%)
Back to Stittsville, the high rate of townhome renters in particular raises a number of questions for me:
Do we need more purpose-built rentals in Stittsville?
Who owns these townhomes? Individuals? Institutional investors?
To what extent are high home prices pushing more people to rent rather than buy?
How affordable are these rentals – for singles or for towns?2
How precarious is the housing situation for people who rent privately-owned homes and townhomes?
More to come…
Principal residence: means that the home or apartment is occupied by the owner.
Tenants: means the until is occupied by a renter
Other: For simplicty, I’ve grouped several categories of tenure into this column: “Permitted Occupants” (usually family members living in a unit); “Mixed Occupancies” (a mix of owners, renters, or permitted occupants); and “Exempted” (any unit not subject to VUT). Most of the units under “Other” are exempted units.
Vacant Unit: A residential unit is considered vacant if it has been unoccupied for an aggregate of more than 184 days during the previous calendar year.
Based on a very small sample size from Rentals.ca, townhomes in Stittsville are listed between $2380-2900/month, and singles range between $3,145-$3,700 per month.