City of Prince George Coun. Cori Ramsay says she supports council's unanimous opposition to the province’s new Short Term Rental Accommodation Act, despite the city not being eligible to opt out.
Ramsay explained why she came to support the push for an opt out in a March 3 blog post, and took the discussion to Reddit.
"Let me clear the air – the question has been asked about whether or not I own or have any partial ownership or financial stake in short-term rental properties which might have influenced my decision," prefaced Ramsay on her blog. "So for the record, no, I do not own or have a financial stake in any short term rentals."
In the blog post, Ramsay said she questions the data supplied by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, which shows rental vacancy rates were 3.7 per cent in 2022 and 2.8 per cent in 2023
"I questioned this data for a couple reasons, the main one being that I am very familiar with the CMHC Market Information Portal and understand its limitations as I use it for work as a Marketing Analyst and have used the data in this portal since 2015 to calculate the living wage for Prince George," writes Ramsay.
She further noted the CMHC Housing Survey only includes data from privately initiated structures with at least three rental units and have been on the market for at least three months, which Ramsay says would automatically exclude single-family detached houses at 17,995, movable dwellings at 2,170, semi-detached houses at 1,285, and apartment or flats in a duplex at 2,305.
"Essentially, right off the get-go, CMHC excludes a significant number of properties – 23,755 to be exact – from the Housing Survey which looks at things like market rents and vacancy rates," Ramsay writes.
Ramsay also noted that based on the city's housing needs assessment, 46 percent of renters are in apartments, or 56 percent living in dwellings not considered by CMHC's survey data.
Row housing has also been omitted by CMHC in 2022 and 2023, said Ramsay, despite being included in 2021, changing the vacancy rate for that housing type from 1.9 to 0.5.
"The reasoning from CMHC is that the data is suppressed to protect confidentiality or the data is not statistically reliable. Given that it was listed in the previous year, I believe there to be a strong likelihood that the data is not reliable rather than being omitted due to confidentiality," writes Ramsay, noting just nine percent of renters reported being in row housing to the city.
"To me, it is reasonable to exclude the row house vacancy rate due to the low number of renters living in this housing type as well as the three bedroom rate being omitted from the data," she adds.
With 259 active Airbnbs in Prince George, roughly 150 short-term rentals are being affected of 31,793 dwellings, writes Ramsay, citing Stats Canada Census Data.
"This is 0.4% of our total dwelling count. Long term rentals are still an attractive investment option and eliminating the 0.4 short term rentals in our community converting them to long term rentals is not going to influence the market enough to change market rental rates and immediately make things more affordable," she concludes.
