The rental housing supply in Kelowna is expected to increase 22% over the next few years.
Planner Adam Cseke says 1479 units of rental housing are being built right now.
"This hopefully should relieve some pressure on the supply side of the residential rental housing market, once those units become occupied. This represents a 22% increase in the supply of primary rental residential housing."
He says that's more than half the number of units brought forward over the last two years.
"The planning department did a review of all residential purpose-built rental projects, from 2016 to the current date, in order to analyze how many residential rental units have been either recently occupied, are under construction, approved but don't have a building permit, or are in the approval process. So the total number of residential units are approximately 2900," he said.
Those 2900 units that have been in play since 2016 represent roughly 56% of the city's total number of rentals, which sits at 5252 in total.
Cseke says that's a lot of supply, but it's not something the city can get complacent about.
"This only shows the supply side - this doesn't show the demand side. This is not factoring in the amount of population growth, so with the amount of residential housing, this should help relieve (pressure). But we're still strongly encouraging more residential housing."
The largest spike will be in the number of bachelor pads. With 447 currently on the market, that number will jump to 857 when current construction projects are finished, for an increase of 48%.
In comparison, 1, 2, and 3 bedroom units are seeing a collective increase of 18%.
In total, half of Kelowna's rental units are two bedroom apartments, with another 556 two-bedroom units in the construction phase.