This week, landlords are feeling the pressure as the demand for student housing drops dramatically after caps were placed on the number of foreign students in Canada. Plus, ten charts that explain Canada’s housing market and one property worth a look.

Canada’s housing market is in an increasingly complex situation. In many markets, mainly in the Prairies and Atlantic Canada, home sales and prices are going up again. But elsewhere, there is turmoil. The preconstruction condo market has collapsed, and the future pipeline for housing looks barren. From who’s on top on home prices to home sales to housing affordability, Matt Lundy, Jason Kirby and Rachelle Younglai bring you ten charts that explain where Canada’s real estate market stands. Here’s a sneak peek:

Fits and starts

On the surface, housing starts aren’t flashing warning signs. In the second quarter, the annualized rate of starts was roughly 277,000 – the best result since late 2022. Condos are falling out of favour, but purpose-built rentals are picking up the slack.

The trouble, however, is that many projects were planned and financed years ago, making housing starts a very backward-looking metric. And the outlook doesn’t look promising. In July, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. forecast roughly 220,000 housing starts for 2027, a decrease of roughly 50,000 units from 2021.

Rates shown are the lowest available for each term/type and category (insured versus uninsured) as of market close on Thursday, Oct. 16.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of investors across the country got into student housing as colleges and universities ramped up their enrolment of foreign students. Investors of all sizes have poured millions of dollars into acquiring and developing privately owned student housing, including single-family homes, condos, duplexes and student residences. But much of that demand dissipated in 2024 after the federal government announced plans to reduce foreign student permits by 35 per cent, in part to help address Canada’s unrelenting demand for housing. Now, as Rachelle Younglai and Salmaan Farooqui write, the case for investing in student housing isn’t as obvious as it once was. Individual investors with properties off campus are bearing the brunt of the declining foreign student population, especially in parts of Atlantic Canada and Ontario where foreign students account for a larger share of the student population.

In the spring of 2021, the City of Calgary launched the Downtown Calgary Development Incentive Program to transform vacant office towers into residential buildings. Four and a half years later, the program has supported the construction of more than 2,450 apartments, 670 of which have already been completed, attracting hundreds of new residents to the city’s core. The sixth and latest retrofit to welcome tenants is the 11-storey Petro Fina building. Formerly the headquarters of Canadian Fina Oil, an arm of Belgium’s Petrofina, the building’s transformation marks a new chapter in its history, and breathes new life into the west end of downtown Calgary. As Ximena Gonzalez writes, experts say office-to-apartment conversions could be an effective tool in increasing the now-dismal availability of rental units in the city.

1 Station Rd., Hillier, Prince Edward County, Ont. – Full gallery here

The cottage in Prince Edward County was built in the early 1900s by a farming family, part of an old United Empire Loyalist settlement. The structure had no indoor plumbing or central heating when Toronto chef Jamie Kennedy bought the property in the early 2000s. Along with his partner, landscape architect Victoria Taylor, the couple transformed the cottage into a cozy, environmentally-sustainable home. Creek House – named for its position next to the water flowing through the property – has 2,100 square feet of living space with two bedrooms, two bathrooms and new spaces for living and entertaining. Throughout the interior, reclaimed wood from a barn down the road was used for the ceiling beams and rustic treads of a staircase to the upper level – while the property’s original farmhouse, renovated in 2005, works well as a guest cottage or a rental home.