Students at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, on Oct. 26, 2018.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
As postsecondary students face another fall housing scramble, some companies in the private sector are offering their own solutions to the crisis.
One of the most aggressive movers is Alignvest Student Housing Real Estate Investment Trust, which started six years ago and now owns 7,100 student housing beds across Canada. The company spent more than $384-million in the first half of 2024 buying additional units. That was before it purchased a newly built 18-storey student housing project in Montreal called The Link for an undisclosed sum.
Sanjil Shah, the fund’s managing partner, says its projects help to relieve housing pressure in more than one way.
“Students in university and college towns take up the traditional stock of housing and that displaces a lot of families and drives up the rents,” said Mr. Shah. “What we are serving is a niche sector, purpose-built student housing: Students don’t need as much space. You can typically fit four to five students in the same footprint of a two-bedroom family apartment. They are there just to study: you need a bed, a desk and a dresser … it’s not like you have a whole family with their life’s belongings.”
Despite the increased density inside the existing units, Mr. Shah says he’s not running dorms. “Ninety-nine per cent of our units are single occupancy bedrooms, there’s no more than two kids sharing a bathroom,” he said. And unlike on-campus residence there’s no meal plans, so students do their own cooking (or order from meal delivery services).
The majority of Alignvest’s beds are in Waterloo, with 3,000 units serving Wilfrid Laurier and the University of Waterloo, but he’s increasingly looking across the country with another purchase this year in Halifax. The company is planning to develop a new project in Toronto above a heritage building designed by E.J. Lennox, architect of such iconic Toronto landmarks as Casa Loma and Old City Hall.
But the pace of development is slow, and Canadian schools need more housing options now, which is why many postsecondary off-campus housing offices partner with organizations such as Places4Students.com that connect small local landlords with new student tenants.
“We’re partnered with 225 campuses, more in Canada, but we have some schools in the U.S.,” said Laurie Snure, general manager for Places4Students. Ms. Snure said as campuses switched back to in-person learning as the COVID-19 pandemic was abating, students came back to find many traditional landlords had taken advantage of rapidly rising property prices to leave the student rental business. “A lot of landlords decided to cash in, that drastically affected the amount of rentals available. For those that stayed in and they saw an opportunity to charge higher rents. It was a crisis … students were living in cars, crowding basement apartments where by-laws were not being followed.”
The company is like a matchmaker, they don’t sign students up for leases or keep a waitlist of those looking for housing, but if they match a student with a landlord, they get a commission. To combat the shortages Places4Students has been running what it calls the Spare Room Campaign since 2023, using a mix of advertising and social media to encourage homeowners with a spare bedroom or an unused nanny suite to consider lodging a student.
“The benefits of that can be an extra source of income, it could be companionship – someone helping with cleaning or walking pets – or learning about different cultures, foods and traditions,” said Ms. Snure. “Everybody points to the government but there’s other things that can be done, that’s what we’re trying to say to Canada: ‘Help out!’”
While more schools are looking to build out their own on-campus housing, there are those that lack the kind of capital or access to public land that some of the country’s larger universities have.
“We supply 92 schools in the Lower Mainland [of British Columbia],” said Toby Chu, the CEO of Global Education Communities Corp. (GECC, formerly CIBT Education Group), which not only owns the private Sprott Shaw College but operates 1,300 student housing beds at a dozen sites and is days away from launching its latest site at 4589 Gladstone St. in East Vancouver, which will add another 285 student beds to its portfolio.
Mr. Chu’s company does a mix of renting directly to students and a form of residence outsourcing. The company contracts with schools to providing a set number of units the administrators fill up with tenants from their student bodies. His company offers a variety of price points, but doesn’t compete with the luxury side of the student market.
“We try to be economical; we cannot be a solution for every segment of the market,” said Mr. Chu, who offers “economy plus and premium and premium plus” options at some sites where the difference might be a bunk bed versus dual bed, or one person per room or two. The most people per bathrooms in his buildings is 2.5, which is a lot better than some of the stories students have told him.
“Take a typical condo in Yaletown – 600 square feet for $3,200 – you have one bedroom and living room: some have four students living together, hanging bedsheets [for privacy]. To me that is terrible, when four persons are going to school and one bathroom,” he said.