According to the CMHC, the price of a two-bedroom apartment in Calgary in October, 2006 was $960, up 19.5 percent from the year before. In Edmonton the price was $808, up from 9.9 per cent the year before.
According to the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Calgary only saw two new apartment projects built last year.
Lai Sing Louie, a senior market analyst, said condo conversions continue to be a much more popular choice for developers because they're cheaper and more profitable.
Louie says 18 per cent of condo conversions are rented out by investors for about 30 per cent higher than regular apartment rents.

Caveat Emptor

I came home from work last Friday to a "Why rent when you can own?" sign on the lawn of my rental building, advertising the units, MY unit, for sale.  Now, I had a feeling that something was up for several weeks.   Let me explain.  My building is generally well maintained.  I'd say the place is 25 - 30 years old, and it's certainly nothing special, but it's kept clean, the lawn is mowed regularly (and noisily), landscaping is kept up, and when you have a problem or issue it's addressed quickly.  The location is fantastic.  I can walk to most anything, including work.  I use my car maybe once a week these days.  It's affordable.  They accept cats.   That being said, it's a 25 - 30 year old rental property that was cheaply built.  The exterior is stucco, which is somewhat more absorbant than say vinyl or aluminum siding, or brick.  Great in the desert, not the best in  the rainy, soggy Vancouver metro area.  About four times a year I have to bleach my window sills because they're growing mildew.   Once, I spent a weekend scraping some freaky black shit off the edges of the window glass - I had to use a screwdriver for it.  It was like a sticky resin, and I've seen it on the window sills in the common hallway.  It's drafty and poorly insulated.  The kitchen is a joke.  The  shared laundry room is a funnier joke.  But all in all, for a rental it's just fine.   And it's home, not just for me but for the tenants of about 79 other units here.  A lot of my neighbors are elderly and have lived in the building for many years.  

A few weeks ago, things started being improved.  There was some scary looking project involving respirator suits and plastic sheeting in the parking garage.  It reminded me of a scene out of the X-files.  The old wooden fencing was torn down and new, prettier wood fencing was put up.   But when I saw the carpeting had been torn out of the main entryways and tile that looks like textured brown stone or slate was being put down, I thought either we're going to be on "Extreme Home Makeover, 80's Apartment Edition", or the building was going condo.   Rental owners don't just up and spend that kind of improvement money unless they've been given a court order.   I hoped I was wrong.  I'm still about 5 boxes away from being completely unpacked from the last move.   Two days later is when I came home and was greeted by the "You're being kicked out" sign.

The sign said the sales office was suite #5.  Practically hyperventilating with anger, I stormed into the building and pounded on the door of suite #5, not bothering to stop at my place to deposit my grocery bags.  A woman of about 60 opened the door.  I could see past her into the unit, and noticed that it had been cosmetically remodeled.  Laminate floor, modern paint colour (and by modern I mean anything other than "real estate white"), Pottery Barn-looking furnishings.  I said to her, "When was I going to be informed that I was losing my home?"  I was smokin' hot pissed off, so much so that I was practically shaking.  She said that she was just there cleaning the place up and didn't know anything about it, that the sales team would be there next week starting Monday. I apologized and told her I realized that it had nothing to do with her, but certainly she could realize how upsetting this was, and that "I'll be back some time next week."  

On the way to my apartment, which includes a walk down a hallway that we call "the concourse", I noticed identical envelopes against a lot of the other apartment doors.  A ha, there's our notice.    Sure enough there was one on our door.  I snatched up the envelope, walked in, dropped my groceries on the table and tore it open.  Oh!  Wonder of wonders, our fabulous unit was for sale for $239,000, and we got first dibs, including an $11,000 decorating budget!  Wasn't that teriffic?   And they were so very concerned about inconveniencing us, but they would give us 24 hours notice before they showed our suite to anyone, and a generous (and legally mandated)  2 months notice before we had to pack up our entire life and move!  I burst into tears and became inconsolable.  For days.  

I can't qualify for a mortgage yet even though I have an excellent credit rating in the US .  I haven't worked in Canada for a minimum 1 year to qualify.  My husband can't qualify on his own for a mortgage large enough to buy this place.  And even if I was eligible, sinking over a quarter of a million dollars into this building would potentially be the stupidest thing we've ever done.  

A day or so later we received a super-fantastic invitation to view the sales suite.  Not being able to pass up a chance to see how they'd gussied up the place, and also to meet the vultures whose immediate goal was to sell our home out from underneath us, when I got home from work we headed down to #5.  On the way, we ran into an impromptu tenants meeting being held in the stairway.  Several of our neighbors were swapping horror stories of the last few weeks in the building with the sales and remodeling.  The boiler had been replaced, but the pipes were too old (or too cheap) to handle the increased water pressure and several had burst, totally flooding two apartments.   The contractors who were doing remodeling work had been leaving the outer security doors propped open, and at least one unit had been burglarized.  The fire alarm has been tripped by the drywallers at least three times so far, so that this morning when the it went off, my husband and I were the only ones who left the building.  It's like the Boy Who Cried Wolf.  The firefighters who were out front seemed pretty irritated that they had to answer another false alarm at our building.  One man said that last year his whole bathroom had to be gutted due to black mold.   A man who had moved into our building recently because the last building he rented in was turned into condos said he was refusing to let them enter his unit to show it.  He said he's got a 14 year old daughter at home alone after school and he'd be damned if strangers were going to be coming into his place.  A very long time tenant said they were aware that the roof needed replacing, something which the new strata owners would most likely end up paying for.  If it's anything like a lot of the other buildings of its era, it won't be long before the entire building envelope needs to be replaced, another thing that the new owners would pay for.  One of the women, whose apartment had been flooded last week, had found a wandering condo gawker in the building and gave them a tour of the water damaged hallway on the first floor where the pipes had burst, sending that prospective buyer running for the exit.  We all agreed that buying a unit in the building was a sucker's bet, especially for the prices they were demanding.   After confirming with our neighbors what we already knew, we continued along to the sales suite.

Lipstick on a pig

I must say, the place cleaned up nicely.  The particular laminate flooring they chose was cheap and cheesy looking, but the paint was pretty and they had put granite countertops in the kitchen and bath.  Very trendy.  It looked spacious and fresh.  We were asked upon arrival if we were tenants already, which unit we lived in, and were we interested in buying at all.  I emphatically told her "No, we're not interested.  We just wanted to see what you've done with the place.".  She got a touch frosty after that.  

I pulled back the lovely new curtains in one of the bedrooms and noticed the same freaky, sticky black shit that I'd scraped off mine before.   I pointed it out to my husband, saying "Looks like they missed a spot".  We both found that the longer we looked around, the madder we were getting, so we left and went back upstairs in silence.   I suppose that as a renter I don't really have the right to feel this way, but it felt like a violation to me.  Perky sales people  were trying their damndest to make sure I have to move, and considering the current scarcity of affordable rentals in my neighborhood anyway, it's not going to be easy to find a new place.  Especially condsidering two things - we have a cat, and up to 79 other people need to find affordable rental housing as well at about the same time.  

Support for proposal to save rentals
Prevents replacement by condo

Dozens of renters lined up at city hall in Vancouver last night to support a staff proposal to protect remaining rental housing stock.
The proposal is to prevent developers from tearing down rental housing and replacing it with condominiums, unless the new building includes at least the same number of rental units as the old one.

Snip

As condo towers go up and apartments are converted to purchase, rental vacancy rates have fallen to approximately 0.3 per cent in 2006. More than half of Vancouver households rent, and approximately one-third of them pay more than 30 per cent of their income toward housing.
Landlords and developers oppose the proposal. They say the condo boom has added thousands of new suites to the rental market. But city staff note rents in those units is on average 22 per cent higher than the purpose-built equivalent."

So, if you know a good source of free quality cardboard boxes, please leave it in the comments.  Having been actively perusing the rental ads in the last week, the possibility of finding an affordable place near here that will take a cat looks pretty bleak.   We may have to leave our neighborhood, somewhere I had hoped I could finally put some roots down - rent until I've been working for a year and maybe buy a place.  A place that, even though it was changing, finally felt like home.