Condominiums are now one in seven occupied Canadian dwellings, and the buildings that hold them are the long-term maintenance, reserve-fund and retrofit market.
Headline figure
15.0%
The share of Canada’s occupied dwellings that were condominiums in 2021, up from 13.3% in 2016. Statistics Canada reports that “Across Canada, census results show there were just under 1.9 million condominium units in 2016, accounting for 13.3% of the occupied housing stock. By 2021, this number had risen to more than 2.2 million units, or 15.0% of Canada’s occupied housing stock” — released 21 September 2022 from the 2021 Census of Population.
What the data says
The 2021 Census counted more than 2.2 million condominium units in Canada. The growth from 2016 was not marginal: the stock added roughly 300,000 units and the share of all occupied dwellings moved 1.7 percentage points in five years.
The geographic concentration is the operationally important part. Nine in ten condominium units sit inside a census metropolitan area, and inside those CMAs the primary downtowns are close to 40% condominium.
| Geography | Condominium share |
|---|---|
| Vancouver (CMA) | 32.5% |
| Toronto (CMA) | 23.9% |
| Calgary (CMA) | 23.8% |
| British Columbia (province) | 23.6% |
| Edmonton (CMA) | 20.5% |
| Montréal (CMA) | 18.7% |
| Canada | 15.0% |
| Ottawa–Gatineau (CMA) | 14.7% |
| Prince Edward Island (province) | 2.9% |
| Newfoundland and Labrador (province) | 2.5% |
Source: Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population, as published in the condominium infographic accompanying the 21 September 2022 release. This mixes CMA and provincial geographies, as Statistics Canada presents them — the two are not interchangeable, so each row is labelled with which it is.
This is where most published claims go wrong. Statistics Canada releases period of construction as a set of categorical bands — 1920 or before, 1921 to 1945, 1946 to 1960, and onward — and does not publish a median or average age of the condominium stock in its analytical releases. A true median would have to be computed from the underlying data table. Any confident “the average Canadian condo is X years old” figure is therefore someone’s calculation rather than an official statistic, and should be treated as one.
What the census does support is a two-boom picture. Statistics Canada reports that “Recently built dwellings are increasingly likely to be occupied by renters—40.4% of the housing built in the five years ending in 2021 was tenant-occupied, the highest tenant rate next to that of dwellings built in the 1960s post-war apartment boom, at 44.5%”. Those two peaks — the post-war apartment wave and the recent building surge — are where the multi-unit stock is concentrated, and they are separated by roughly six decades.
A building from the post-war wave and a building completed in 2020 are different businesses for anyone maintaining them. The older cohort is at or past the point where major components — envelope, mechanical systems, parking structures — reach end of life, which is exactly what a reserve fund study exists to anticipate. In Ontario, the Condominium Authority of Ontario requires that a study’s financial analysis include a recommended funding plan projected over a period of at least 30 consecutive years.
For a construction or property management company, the practical read is that the renewal market and the new-build market are two different pipelines aimed at two different vintages of the same asset class. The residential investment split shows where the new-build half is currently being funded; vacancy and turnover in Canadian rentals covers what happens to the rental side of that stock.
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