Image of the day: Vacancies and rents
When vacancies are high, rents go down, even in expensive cities
People don’t just move around randomly, they go where the jobs are. When Covid hit and a lot of people were suddenly working from home, there were a lot of jobs which were no longer tethered to expensive cities. In those cities, high vacancies resulted in falling rents. In Toronto, asking rents fell 20%.
In the big picture, though, people working from home needed more space, driving up total demand for residential space. Remote work means we need more housing, not less.