Dirty 30: Rent in Calgary now up 30% from last year

Dirty 30: Rent in Calgary now up over 30% from last year

While the housing market started to take off, many continued to rent in Calgary because they couldn’t afford to buy.

Well now renting isn’t a whole lot better.

According to the latest report from Zumper, rent in Calgary for a one-bedroom unit is up just over 30% from this time last year.

Zumper

The price to rent a one-bedroom place in Calgary went up 1.4% last month, bringing the total to $1,500 even. That is up 30.4% from this time last year.

Two bedroom units are also up from this time last year. The current price is $1,700, which is up 24.1%. However, that is actually a 2.9% drop from last month.

And while those numbers seem very high, it is still a whole lot better than other major cities in Canada. We actually dropped one spot this month to the 16th most expensive city in Canada to rent.

Calgary Skyline (Muriel Lasure/Shutterstock)

To the surprise of no one, Vancouver is still the priciest.

In October 2022, the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Vancouver was $2,500, a 0% change month-over-month but still a massive increase (19%) year-over-year.

Regarding two bedrooms, the median rent price fell to $3,500 in October. However, year-over-year, that’s still up 16.7%.

In Toronto, the second most expensive rental market in Canada, the median rent for a one-bedroom in October 2022 was $2,130, and a two-bedroom was way cheaper than in Vancouver, reaching a median rent price of $2,680.

Three BC cities rounded out the top five: Burnaby, Victoria, and Kelowna.

According to Zumper, Hamilton had the fastest-growing rental market last month.

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As for our neighbours to the north, Edmonton came in at number 22 on the list.

In Edmonton, prices are so low compared to Vancouver that you could virtually rent three two-bedroom apartments for the price of one in Vancouver.

Median and average rent are two very different metrics. Median means that half of the available units are above and half of the units are below the respective one and two-bedroom rates listed in Zumper’s analysis. Zumper looks at asking prices for rentals across big cities.

“For our monthly rent reports, we aggregate data from over one million active listings to calculate median asking rents for the top 100 cities by population and nearly 300 additional cities within major metro areas.”

With files from Amir Ali