I’m going to begin combining news items, so I can inform but not overwhelm. This will allow me to share more without generating a pile of email notices.
The Tiny Home Show in Ottawa this past weekend was a real success from my perspective. I made lots of great contacts with business people that are eager to help us move forward, along with many future tiny home community citizens. I love talking with everyone, sharing our vision of Less Space, More Life™ as it reinforces that this is a worthwhile pursuit. This year more than ever, the general response has been, “this is exactly what I am looking for, when can I move in?” Happily we are working on 2-projects now, one in Odessa, ON and the other in Elliot Lake, ON. This was the focus of our booth info, and my presentation to close the show, so if you missed it, I am polishing up the presentation and will post it here when complete.
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Scary news from our friends at Rentals.ca that the average asking rents for all residential property types in Canada increased by 9.3% year-over-year in April, reaching an average of $2,188 per month according to Rentals.ca and Urbanation’s latest National Rent Report. This rate of increase is an acceleration from the 8.8% annual increase recorded in March.
Key points from the summary:
- Average asking rents in Canada increased by 9.3% year-over-year in April.
- Rents have surged by a total of 32% since hitting their COVID-19 low in April 2021.
- Purpose-built rentals outpaced condos with a growth rate of 13.1%.
- Saskatchewan emerged as the provincial leader in annual rent growth, surpassing Alberta with an 18.4% increase.
May Rental Report
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Welcome to Richard Schumacher, P.Eng.
Richard has been helping me for the past few months bring the vision of tiny home community living into the “real world”. His years of experience as a Land Development Professional, has been somewhat frustrating at times, as I have been forced to face the challenges that being a developer actually involves.
He is a high performing professional with 20+ years of experience in real estate development, construction, entrepreneurship and start-ups. Known for exception people skills, adaptability to any environment, resourcefulness and finding collaborative and innovative solutions to complex problems. He believes in showing up and going the extra mile. He accepts the challenge, learns from failure and embraces the unknown.
His experience and controlled enthusiasm has been a welcome addition to our volunteer team. You can find him on LinkedIn here …
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Further on the topic of land development …
I have come to learn that the layers of bureaucracy that have evolved, while I understand have been created to protect, direct, and organize, have also become a nearly insurmountable barrier to development. And with each level of bureaucracy comes another round of costs, and who ultimately pays theses fees, the home-buyer. Initially the developer pays the costs with borrowed money for construction. This borrowed money also carries fees in addition to interest, so a simple $100 municipal fee may cost $125-150 by the time it reaches the home-buyer, depending on the length of time it takes the development to be sold, and there are many. Not that the developer is making money on this, it’s just that a development can cost millions to complete, all that carries interest and fees. Some may say this supports the reason to build more rental units, so the consumer isn’t burdened with these extra costs, but these costs still must be paid, and are some of the reason new purpose-built rental rates are so high.
With the current high interest rates, I have noticed a reduction in traditional construction. At the tiny home show this weekend, I had several developers approach me, interested in exploring tiny home community development. While the governments have been highlighting the advancements they are making in lowering barriers to development in the media, what hasn’t been mentioned is that new construct starts continues to decline. It can take years for a new builds to begin, so what we see now are high-density projects that may have started planning in 2014. It will take years for the effects of fighting to reduce inflation with high interest rates to be seen in housing development. I am hopeful that this will help our nimble, scalable tiny home community model to take hold in a big way.
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In closing, we are working to eliminate the phrase “tiny home” from our vocabulary. As a society, we tend to attach associations to words and phrases, and in many places “tiny home” has become associated with transient, trailer park, and slum. I gave our form of housing a lot of thought and realized that what we are building is communities of bachelor sized bungalows. Early on I moved away from the concept of homes on wheels, as this involved more explanation than I wanted to put into educating building officials. While I loved the idea of taking your home with you when you moved, we have since evolved the community concept to a national cooperative, that allows you to move within the network, without cost. Moving someone that has embraced a minimalistic lifestyle, doesn’t include moving all the “stuff” that makes moving a chore. So from here on, we will use Bachalows™ to refer to our form of permanent, inspected, building code compliant, bachelor sized bungalows, and look forward to explaining what these are every time someone asks.
