Condo project targets students
Housing market slowdown prompts change
A fresh approach to student housing that combines real estate investors, highrises, public transit and one of Ottawa’s hot spots for condominium development is set to launch Sept. 28.
That’s when Envie Student, a new wing of Ashcroft Homes, holds its VIP launch for the first of two student residence towers at 101 Champagne Ave. S., former site of the Ottawa Humane Society. The site is just west of Little Italy, a hive of current and planned condo construction.
The two towers are known collectively as Capital Hall Condominiums. When completed, they’ll have more than 500 fully furnished units with room for up to 1,000 students. And they’re close to the O-Train Trillium Line’s Carling Station, which is one stop from Carleton University, whose students could benefit the most from the development.
The first tower, 28 storeys and ready for occupancy by the start of the 2016 school year, will comprise 329 studio, one- and two-bedroom units that will be sold condo-style to investors who in turn will rent them to students. The units start at $179,900 for 317 square feet. Rents will begin at $1,100, and Envie Student is offering investors a leaseback option under which the company will rent out the units on behalf of the purchasers for the first two years.
The second building, expected to open in 2018, will be owned entirely by Envie Student, which will rent directly to students. The 25-storey building will have 183 units, most of them three or four bedrooms. Leasing should start early in 2016. Rents have not yet been set.
Amenities are generous, including a fitness centre, party room, lounge with study areas and outdoor courtyard. There will be onsite housekeeping services, and plans are afoot for a street-level grocery store and coffee shop.
Envie Student will manage both buildings.
The two towers originally received city approval as regular condo buildings, but when condominium sales began slumping across the city in 2013, Ashcroft spotted a silver lining amid the gloom.
“It became clear that there was a growing shortage of housing for students, and the realization hit that this is an ideal opportunity,” says Ashcroft CEO David Choo. “The soft condo market in Ottawa was a nice coincidence.”
Proximity to Carleton will give the university a particular edge in attracting foreign students, Choo believes.
“(Foreign) parents won’t send their kids to Carleton and spend $20,000 on tuition (the average is actually closer to $24,000) and have them live in the kind of place I had when I was at Carleton,” says Choo, who is originally from Guyana and studied engineering at Carleton in the 1970s.
Good quality student housing has long been an issue in Ottawa, where roughly 80,000 full-time students attend Carleton, the University of Ottawa and Algonquin College, the city’s three biggest post-secondary institutions.
For example, only 3,621 of a total full-time student population of roughly 24,000 at Carleton live in on-campus housing. That leaves a lot of people scrambling for accommodation — some of it decidedly dumpy — every year.
“We absolutely have a wait list for people wanting to live in residence,” says Laura Storey, Carleton’s director of housing. She adds that students have reported trouble finding accommodation off-campus, although she can’t say what sort of housing they are looking for.
Student housing challenges may or may not increase in the future. Ontario saw university enrolment grow 49 per cent from 2002 to 2014. However, last fall the Ontario Universities’ Application Centre reported a downward trend in enrolment at colleges and universities as the children of baby boomers finished their post-secondary education.
Changing trends or not, developers are jumping into the student housing market. They seem especially keen to serve the University of Ottawa.
Last fall, construction started on a nine-storey private student residence on Mann Avenue, close to the university. More recently, the Ontario Municipal Board approved a multi-storey private student residence at Laurier Avenue East and Friel Street in Sandy Hill after the city turned thumbs down on it. Campus Suites’ 1Eleven, a former Holiday Inn on Cooper Street, is taking applications for this school year with rents starting at $795 per month. All told, the three projects will add over 1,200 beds within walking distance of the University of Ottawa.
Landlords like these will need to ensure good tenant-neighbour relations.
That hasn’t always been the case with student housing, where loud parties are among the complaints voiced by neighbouring residents. In the case of Capital Hall Condominiums, there’s been little community concern about the influx of young residents, according to Karen Wright, president of the Civic Hospital Neighbourhood Association.
“We’re not anticipating any of the troubles that have happened in other areas of the city,” she says. Some residents have said that students will bring a “lively presence” to the area, she adds. As well, she says that since students by and large use public transit or bicycles, additional traffic should not be an issue.
Ashcroft says noise control and other policies are in the works for its development. As well, the two buildings will have no balconies in an attempt to reduce noise complaints.
“There will be no big, wild parties in these buildings,” says Choo.
Also absent, he says, will be traffic chaos at the beginning and end of each school year.
“The world of off-campus housing is the 12-month lease so you don’t have massive move-ins and move-outs.”