There is a shortage of 100,000 housing units across Quebec, says the APCHQ

An analysis by the Association of Construction and Housing Professionals of Quebec (APCHQ) released on Monday indicates that there are no less than 100,000 housing units missing in Quebec, so that we can indeed speak of a shortage.

The real estate bubble

In the case of single-family homes, based on the ratio of listings to home sales, the‘APCHQ comes to the conclusion that it would take 58,000 additional properties on the market to restore a certain balance.

It is this imbalance that has led to the dramatic increases in average property prices over the past two years. The surge is not insignificant: the average price of properties in Quebec, all categories combined, jumped 16% in 2020 and then 19% in 2021, the result of never-before-seen bidding by buyers who are too numerous for the number of available properties.

Housing: too low a vacancy rate

As for private rental housing, the analysis underlines that the balance between supply and demand is considered to have been reached when the vacancy rate is at 3%.

However, it has now been four years since the vacancy rate for private rental housing in Quebec has been below this threshold, which again attests to a shortage. L’APCHQ estimates this shortage of rental units at around 15,000, which translated into average rent increases in Quebec of 3.7% in 2020 and 3.6% in 2021.

HLM: not found

Finally, the search for social housing, which has always been a demanding quest, has become a veritable obstacle course. To determine the number of social housing units that should be built, theAPCHQ add the number of households waiting for an HLM or a rent supplement to arrive at a total of 37,000 for all of Quebec.

The Association recognizes that there are no miracle solutions.It is absolutely necessary to rapidly increase the supply of housing in Quebecwe write in the analysis.

She stresses that we must go well beyond building housing to meet the needs of a growing population and adding more to fill this important deficit. Even with 10,000 more dwellings per year than population growth needs, it will take at least 10 years to make up the shortfall.

Three major obstacles to catching up

Except that such an ambitious goal will not be easy to achieve. The authors of the analysis identify three obstacles on the road to restoring the balance, starting with another shortage, that of labor in the construction sector.

In second place, unsurprisingly, are the supply difficulties caused by the pandemic, which has caused construction costs to jump, dependent on the explosion in the price of materials and transport costs. L’APCHQ estimates that this inflationary surge is behind a 17% increase in the price of a new home in Quebec in 2021, upward pressure that is likely to intensify due to the war in Ukraine and its impact on all prices.

Finally, the upward trend in interest rates has a double consequence: on the one hand, builders find themselves struggling with an increase in the cost of financing real estate projects, while potential buyers come up against an inflationary shock when the time comes to negotiate a mortgage.

In such a context, accelerating the rate of housing construction while maintaining reasonable prices for these new dwellings represents an enormous challenge.we write.

The Association recognizes that it will be necessary to hope for a surge of ingenuity and a mobilization of the actors of the housing sector in order to find innovative, effective solutions that can be deployed as soon as possible.

In any case, the Association warns, however, that its data are estimates and that in this sense they are intended only indicative of the order of magnitude of the structural housing deficit.