UBCO students in Kelowna less desperate for off-campus rental help
The numbers are starting to show an improvement in the rental housing situation in Kelowna, and a support service university students turn to is seeing less panic and desperation.
Stefanie Allen is the director for student engagement at the University of British Columbia Okanagan and she runs the off-campus housing support. She said in the past few years students have been reaching out less.
“We haven't seen as much sort of desperation from students. Typically, sort of how we kind of gauge student need is by the number of students reaching out to our off-campus housing program for support. And that support has been a lot less needed,” Allen said.
The rental vacancy rate in Kelowna is at 4.5 per cent, up from 1.7 per cent last year.
She said five years ago students were running into scammers taking advantage of the desperate housing market, but now that’s far less common.
“Scammers took full advantage of that. And also just the rental rates or the vacancy rates were so low at that point,” Allen said. “Since then, we've seen it shift a little bit. It's definitely become a little bit more relaxed.”
The City of Kelowna banned short-term rentals and Allen suspects that helped more students find housing. The city has also been approving purpose-built rentals quickly to meet provincial housing targets.
“I can't say for certain whether or not the new Airbnb laws... really play into that. I suspect that they do,” she said.
The regulations came into effect on May 1, 2024 after there was a 93 per cent rise in short-term rentals in Kelowna between 2020 and 2023, from 630 to 1,217. There were only 427 legal short-term rentals in the city earlier this year, but Airbnb says there are more than 1,000 homes in Kelowna.
As much as the rental market for students has improved, Allen said affordability is still the major issue. There were 1,637 new rental units at market price and there were 170 new affordable units built since June 2024.
“Regardless of if they're a grad student or an undergraduate student, it's just the affordability of housing is kind of the number one thing that we are seeing,” she said.
UBCO has a listing site for student housing, Places4Students and there are 10 times more rentals listed than there were a few years ago.
“We were lucky to have like a handful back in 2021 posted on there,” she said. “I think last time I checked, we had like over 60 listings for student friendly housing on our platform. So going from like a handful of listings to a large sum.”
She said typically she gets calls in the summer from students who can’t find housing, but this year things have been much calmer.
“We haven't had a lot of like urgent, desperate reach outs from students, which usually the panic kind of starts in like July,” she said.
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