How you see the housing/rental market depends ever so much on whether you’re a houser or a housee.  For example, this article from Vancouver is Awesome:

Apartment building owners face tougher times, but prices remain high

Another spook in the rental space is the spectre of an inventory spike in a market accustomed to the tightest vacancy rate of any major Canadian city.

In the city of Vancouver, the number of rentals available in July increased 15.1 per cent from the same month a year earlier to 5,319 listings.

“Summer is usually tight relative to the rest of the year for rental supply, but we saw more listings this July than any month in 2017,” said Louie Dinh, a data analyst at Quantitative Rhetoric. Dinh compiles his information from online rental advertising listings.

He added that Vancouver rent increases have stalled, albeit at nosebleed levels, since January. Current advertised rents in Vancouver are $1,950 for a one-bedroom, with two-bedrooms at an average of $2,650 per month.

Dinh suggests the increase in rentals is linked to the 30 per cent plunge in housing sales this year in Metro Vancouver compared with 2017.

Inventory spike, soaring rentals (I think 15 percent constitutes ‘soaring’), stalled rent increases, plunge in sales – bad news all around for apartment-building owners.

The story could be completely rewritten as good news, of course: signs that the housing and rental crisis is alleviating, that government policies and incentives are beginning to have effect.

But ‘good’ news is rarely received well.  Advocates for more affordable housing rarely acknowledge success (It’s a good beginning’ is the best you will get); those benefiting from scarcity and rising prices, as demonstrated above, have their own spin.

So if you want to get a sense of how things are changing, ask those least benefiting from change to see if they’re getting spooked.