In Zumper Rental's monthly rent report, four B.C. cities remain in the top 10 across the country when it comes to rent prices.
Vancouver sits atop of the country with a median rent of $2,500, followed by Burnaby at $2,300. Victoria sits fourth on the list at $2,070.
Despite a slight decrease in rental prices in Kelowna, the Central Okanagan city has moved up one spot on the report, in a tie for seventh with Barrie, Ontario.
from online listings to create an approximation of the rental market in cities across North America. According to Zumper, the median one-bedroom rental in Kelowna is valued at $1,850.
The median is the middle value in a dataset is organized in ascending or descending order. The median is calculated by finding the middle value in an ordered data set. For example; the median price in a data set of five where candy is priced at $1, $2, $10, $11 and $53, would be $10 because it is in the centre of the ordered data set. Median values do not account for outliers and extreme values and are only an indication of the centre of a data set.
While Zumper reports that the median rent in Kelowna has decreased by 4.1 percent since March, and is down 2.1 percent since last year, the rest of the country has also seen decreases in median rental prices, moving Kelowna up one spot on the rental price list to seventh.
Additionally, Zumper suggests that people allocate approximately 30 per cent of their pre-tax income to rent, meaning that to afford the median one-bedroom rental in Kelowna would require a household income of approximately $74,000.
In B.C., the current minimum wage is $17.40 per hour, meaning if a person works 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year at a minimum wage job they will make approximately $33,478 per year, before taxes. B.C.'s minimum wage is set to increase across the province to $17.85 on June 1.
Using Zumper's guidelines of allocating no more than 30 percent pre-tax income to rent, in Kelowna two people who live in the same residence and both work full-time at minimum wage jobs are unable to afford the median price of a one-bedroom rental.
In 2020, found that the median household income after taxes in Kelowna was $73,500.
