UCalgary students struggle to find decent housing for upcoming school year

A University of Calgary engineering student is detailing how hard it has been to find a place to live ahead of classes this Fall.

The city’s tight rental market is leaving students coming here for the fall semester for the upcoming school year scrambling to find a place to live.

Students heading to the University of Calgary might have some difficulty finding housingas the university says their on-campus units are at capacity and that’s combined with an extremely competitive rental market in nearby, off-campus apartments.

Omer Sajjad, a student who’s coming to Calgary from Manitoba, says when he learned he was accepted this month, he immediately applied for student housing.

“I wasn’t really expecting to have to search very hard, I was expecting that I’d be able to get into residence right away,” said Sajjad.

“As soon as I was finished applying I got like an automatic reply email saying they were already at full capacity and that I would be put on a waitlist,” said Sajjad.

“And so I reached out further to kind of find out where I was at the waitlist at that time in July and I believe I was on the 90th or close to the 100th spot on that waitlist,” said Sajjad.

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He’s found a place now but says landlords are requiring an immediate response because they have many future tenants to pick from.

“People were either looking for someone coming in August or something, not really like September for the beginning of school, so that’s kind of one of the responses I got from a lot of landlords,” said Sajjad.

Coming from Winnipeg, he had to rely on a friend in Calgary to check out the apartments as landlords had a quick turnaround.

“Like if you weren’t interested, they already had a few other people they who were talking to. Even before I’d reach out, they would say that they had someone interested, if they don’t accept, then they’ll reach out to me, or vice versa,” said Sajjad.

Sajjad says he’s found his own place now but it wasn’t easy.

“The other response from the landlord was I wouldn’t say picky but they wanted to make sure the students coming into their place were good students so they wanted to meet you in person,” said Sajjad.

The tight market is also being felt at the University of Calgary’s Student Union as their apartment posting board is essentially vacant.

“Postings on our board is actually down 80 per cent since 2019, with only 15 listings for June and July,” said Nicole Schmidt, U of C’s Student’s Union President.

The U of C students union sent out a notice Thursday asking Calgarians to think about offering up space to rent whether that’s a spare room, basement suite, apartment, or laneway housing to help alleviate the housing crunch.

–With files from Jillian Code