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Rising rental prices are creating a competitive market for students trying to find off-campus housing.
For close to four months, a University of Waterloo student, living in Cambridge, has been searching for a place she and her partner can call home, with no luck.
The two live in Preston in a rental unit where they pay month to month alongside a third roommate.
They are looking for a more affordable home, hoping to remain in Cambridge to stay close to work while being able to commute to Waterloo for school.
“I’ve been looking since January onward and it’s been difficult. I would either fill out applications or I would go in to see these apartments and I wouldn't hear anything back,” said 24-year-old Katherine Taubert, a student of public policy.
“A lot of times it usually ends up being a lack of response and the listing appears sold and gets removed and I never hear back at all.”
The assistant director of campus housing at the University of Waterloo, Jennifer Ferguson, has been hearing about how competitive the off-campus rental market is for students for months.
She said students used to not need or use their online resources as much as they currently are.
“In the future we are looking at what we can do to provide even more housing spaces and we are also taking the affordability of housing into consideration as we move forward into some strategic planning.”
She said the university is trying to provide an array of options to help students with the process, including a plan to transition their internal off-campus housing listing service to an external organization that will provide more opportunities for students to connect to more rental listings.
Resources are provided on the university’s student housing page to help students looking for an off-campus rental.
“I think they’ll find once we do this it will increase the number of landlords that use the site and give them more availability to look at.”
The University of Waterloo also warns students to be wary of fraudulent rentals or scams.
Ferguson said they have received several recent complaints from students.
“If it doesn’t feel right you shouldn’t sign anything, have someone review or check it,” she warns.
Taubert has yet to come close to signing or agreeing to any lease with only one out of forty applications getting a response.
“People are sometimes paying for a whole year’s rent ahead of time and it makes it really hard for us and others to get their foot out into the market successfully.”
The rental market has been seeing an increase in prices for over a few years.
A report from this past March, written by Rentals.ca, indicates that the average price to rent a one bedroom in Kitchener was $1,576, an increase of 9.2 per cent from last year.
While a two bedroom had an average price of $1,889 with a 13.3 per cent increase from last year.
