TOP STORY

📖 The truth about student impact

In the past year and a half, we’ve surveyed more than 1,000 young Canadians, helped get 4,576 housing units approved, and given away $8,000 in grants to students.

This is the true story of how we achieved the vast majority of this as full-time students at a university with no real estate education, distilled into steps you can apply to issues you’re passionate about.

Find your passion and learn about the space

We were interested in housing, but the University of Victoria didn’t have any courses for us to become educated on the issues at hand.

So we created UVic Real Estate to connect young people with industry leaders through networking, education, and advocacy.

Identify the problem you’re going to solve

While we started this club as a space for learning and growth, we quickly realized how political housing was. From our experiences and those of our friends, we knew students were struggling and we had to share our stories.

To give feedback on new housing (in BC), you speak at a public hearing in front of your local city councillors. We went to a hearing for the largest project in Victoria’s history — 1,500 rental homes and 80 affordable units — and talked about what young people were (and still are) facing.

One student mentioned a friend was renting a backyard to pitch a tent and sharing the kitchen and washroom with indoor tenants. All this just to be able to stay in school.

The City Councillors were floored. They weren’t used to hearing directly from young people about how the housing crisis impacted them.

Three councillors quoted student stories when explaining their decision to approve the project. This was the lightbulb moment — the student voice had tons of power to create change, but it wasn’t often heard.

If this was the case in Victoria, it was likely the same in other cities — we needed to figure out how to engage students across the country.

Identify your solution

Our goal was to find a way to understand what mattered to young Canadians at scale, leveraging our reach to other real estate clubs. In our first year, we got started in late February, meaning we had a tiny window to execute before the end of the school year.

The most tangible way to go beyond Victoria in a short period of time was to create a survey and distribute it via local connections.

Find local leaders to help

We’ve learned the hard way that trying to engage people on the other side of the country without in person support is fighting a losing battle. If you want to make an impact in more than one city, you’ll need help on the ground.

We leveraged our work with UVic Real Estate to connect with other club leaders across Canada. These connections are the foundation that the Student Housing Initiative was built on.

Build relationships with decision makers

Working with student leaders isn’t good enough. Once you have identified a solution to your problem and created a distribution network, it’s critical to loop in the decision makers where you want to impact.

For us, we talked about the project with city councillors, city planning staff, housing developers, provincial politicians, university leadership, and more. This network can almost be as valuable as your idea for a solution.

Mobilize your solution

With a problem, solution, distribution, and a network in place, we were ready to mobilize our research study.

Incentives are a great way to encourage students to participate. If you need help with funding, you’d be surprised how many decision makers want to help passionate youth make a difference.

In the 2023 study, we gave away $3,000. As we expanded our reach from Toronto, Vancouver, and Victoria to include Calgary and Kelowna in 2024, we increased this to $5,000, bringing the total to 16 $500 grants.

Share your work

Executing may be the most important piece of the puzzle. A good idea is meaningless if you can’t bring it into reality.

For us, we narrowly hit our window to succeed in 2023, and while we had hoped for more responses, it was the push we needed to get going. We used the 250 responses we got to write a detailed report for our network of decision makers. The impact snowballed from there, only getting bigger in 2024.

Our 2023 and 2024 Outlooks remain a consistent way to connect with new leaders in the housing space. It’s a simple way to provide value to them and introduce our work all in one go. The foreword for our most recent report was a result of a cold LinkedIn dm to Canada’s top housing researcher that attached our 2023 Outlook.

Review success

We defined success as achieving our goal of impact. In the case of the Student Housing Initiative, that was showing decision makers what students wanted and leveraging our research to help put those desires into place.

While we were a part of the approvals of 4,576 new homes, they won’t be ready for 5 or more years. The reality of the housing shortage is that young people are struggling now.

Our focus since graduating from university has been to power the future of housing with the young voice. We have to build cities for the next generations of their residents. We continue to explore ways to expand our footprint into immediate solutions that complement our work thus far. Stay tuned!

To sum it all up

Making an impact as a student is entirely accessible, but your success or failure comes down to persistence and a lot of luck.

We found that the more persistent we were, the luckier we got. When you do lots of cool things and talk about them to people who can make a difference, you increase your surface area for lucky interactions to take place.

The most important thing to remember is that your voice matters.

👏 Good news in housing

10 year Toronto Action Plan targets 285k new homes by 2031

The City plans to achieve its housing goal by incentivizing new affordable housing and increasing density near transit stations. It aims to create 41k affordable rental units, 17.5k rent-controlled units, and 6.5k rent-geared-to-income units in the process. Diverse housing typology and affordability levels is the goal. Keep reading…

$1.7 billion acquisition in the private student housing market

Forum Asset Management’s Real Estate Income and Impact Fund have agreed to acquire Alignvest Student Housing Real Estate Investment Trust’s portfolio, creating the largest private student housing entity in Canada. This deal signals greater investment in student housing, which should create new supply in underserved markets. Keep reading…

900 affordable and social housing units announced Montreal

A partnership between federal, provincial, and municipal governments is responsible for this $340 million investment. Units will be built by a community partner and remain affordable over the long run, with rents increasing at a slower pace than privatized housing. Keep reading…

🗂 Resources for new renters

Whether it’s your first time living on your own or you’ve been renting for years, this is the time of year that lots of young people are getting settled in new places, which can involve dealing with a new landlord.

Is your landlord illegally entering your unit, trying to change your agreement without your consent, or unreasonably preventing you from having overnight guests?

If so, and you can’t quite figure out how to word a message to your landlord, check out the list of template letters from BC’s Tenant Resource and Advisory Centre to help you out.

There’s even a template roommate agreement.

Feedback on this week’s content