Room to Let

I am the kind of person who, if you put a cereal box in front of me, will dutifully read all the text on the cereal box, even though I don’t eat cereal and don’t have any need for whatever passes for information on the cereal box. Similarly, put a newspaper in front of me and I dutifully read it all, page after page, even if I’m only visiting in the town that produces the newspaper. Needless to say, when it comes to local papers, I even read all the ads in the classified section as if somewhere in there the secret life of the town will surprisingly be revealed.

And now and then, it is. Up here on the Sunshine Coast, we get a newspaper every week, so it is somewhat puzzling that I get anything done besides reading the paper, except that it isn’t very long. A front section with local news, an abbreviated ‘culture/events’ section, and an even more abbreviated sports section, where I can follow the travails of the Gibsons' Pigs. And in there with the sports are a few pages of classified ads. In the past few years, the ads have burgeoned, mostly because everyone living here appeared to have decided to sell his/her house. Except that in the spring, there’s always a lot of real estate for sale because it is, after all, a tourist economy for the most part (logging, a little fishing, and providing for the short-term and long-term tourists are about it).

In a tourist/seasonal visitor economy, like the Sunshine Coast as well as Point Roberts, there’s always a lot of real estate for sale but rarely much real estate for rent. Frequently, the rentals section up here was barely a column, and particularly spare were rentals in Roberts Creek, where we live. This is equally true of Point Roberts. But in this week’s paper, I find that rentals have suddenly expanded into a couple of pages, with Roberts Creek alone getting an entire column. Stranger yet, several of the ads mentioned that what was being rented was one floor of the house--not like a guest suite, but just a floor. I’d never seen that before. Some of the ads were for short-term rental (which is to say off season/not the summer/early fall), but mostly they were regular leases.

There’s a secret in there somewhere. I don’t know whether it means that financially-pressed folks are reduced to renting out floors of their house to make their house payments, that people who were in the flipping business got stuck with houses that can’t be sold and now need to be rented, or that the seasonal visitors (those with second houses here) are having second thoughts. In any case, it sounds as if it isn’t good news unless you are somebody looking to rent. And in Point Roberts? Well, we’ll see what it looks like there after the first of March.