The success of Canmore’s Crazyweed restaurant on the culinary scene is making it one of the sought after places to eat in the Bow Valley – but good luck getting in on a Tuesday.
The famed eatery, featured most recently on Food Network’s You Gotta Eat Here, has decided to shut its doors all day on Tuesdays and Wednesdays for lunch because it doesn’t have enough kitchen staff.
Owner Jan Hrabec and her daughter Eden, who heads the kitchen team, say it was a tough decision, especially during the busy summer months when money is to be made in the tourism market.
While both note summer 2014 has been the busiest they have seen, they are struggling to find kitchen staff because of a tight rental market and the cost of living.
“We have had a lot of people interested in coming here for the summer just not able to find a place to live or the cost of living was too high, so it wasn’t a big attraction for people,” Eden said. “It is a real struggle this summer compared to previous summers.”
She said the hours for kitchen staff are adding up and the reason for shutting down for a day and a half is to ensure they get to have days off.
“The more overworked our cooks are the more over fatigued they are and they can’t handle the volume coming in – with the rest we get, we are able to perform at higher standards,” Eden said. “We definitely just want to continue to provide a great experience for our customers.”
“We have chosen to close down because everyone needs quality of life and to make people work even if they are making overtime … they can’t enjoy it because they have no time to enjoy it and they are just spent,” Jan added. “It was a very hard decision to make.”
Housing in Canmore can become challenging for the summer months, with many workers coming to staff hotel and service industry jobs for the season. Going into the summer, the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation put out its spring rental market survey and Canmore’s vacancy rate was listed as zero.
The survey itself, pointed out Canmore Community Housing Corporation executive director Jennifer Bisley, uses a very specific methodology to calculate vacancy rates.
“There are some questions as to whether the methodology is really appropriate for Canmore given it is more for the traditional rental market; apartment buildings and that sort of thing,” she said. “It doesn’t take into account the secondary rental market with individuals renting out their condos and things like that.”
CMHC numbers were based on a total of 79 rental units with an average rent of $814 for a one-bedroom unit and just over $1,000 for a two bedroom. Because it only considers apartment-style units, it captures mostly the older apartment stock in Canmore. The 2011 municipal census counted 1,861 households in Canmore that were rentals – a much broader figure than CMHC looked at.
“I am not saying the vacancy rate is not zero or close to zero, but I would be cautious with those statistics,” Bisley said. “We track more the availability rather than vacancy and availability is definitely shrinking and rental rates are definitely increasing.”
While CCHC manages a stock of perpetually affordable housing that is bought and sold, it also has a portfolio of 60 units of PAH rental units at Palliser. This year it plans on moving forward with another rental development and build 32 townhome units in Three Sisters.
Bisley said CCHC gets a lot of inquiries from people who have just arrived in Canmore and have a job, but didn’t realize what the housing market was like. She said many end up leaving after being unable to find a place to live.
“But there is an informal rental market as well where people know people and that seems to be very active and many of the longer term residents find housing even for temporary purposes through that informal market as well,” she added.
Peka Professional Property Management owner Mark Walker said this year has been the most difficult he has experienced in the past 10 years, but there are multiple factors affecting the local rental market.
With lots of jobs in the valley, he said not many people are leaving, however, with a hotter real estate market than the past few years, many who rented their properties instead of selling at a loss have relisted.
“The real estate market has picked up, so that is creating a bit of a crunch with established tenants and during the recession we didn’t have any large construction starts,” Walker said. “Even three years ago we would get injections of inventory onto the market every four or five months and that hasn’t happened in a while.
“The hammers have started swinging now, so I think that trend won’t be as crucial of a factor moving forward, but it is all part of the reason we are experiencing such a tight market this year.”
One trend definitely affecting the rental market, according to Walker, is that many properties rented to tenants through Peka were listed on the real estate market in spring.
“A lot of them actually sold, so there is a number of families that are faced with that 90-day notice and that has been our biggest pressure in our portfolio,” he said. “We really want to make sure that tenants that have experience with us are taken care of and the inventory is pretty dry.”
He said Peka has been working to place tenants that have been with the company for some time in properties that become available, meaning many are not being listed publicly for rent.
“We’re trying to make sure great tenants of ours that we have a history with are taken care of first and foremost, which is why we aren’t advertising as many of them on the website. But we are still moving them behind the scenes,” he said. “There’s lots being rented, but they are not sitting long.”
Sotheby’s Realtor Christopher Vincent said the real estate market in Canmore is seeing the strongest sales since its previous peak in 2006-07.
“It is a really strong market between great mortgage rates and renewed confidence in the Alberta economy as a whole,” he said, adding the majority of buyers are from out of town.
It is challenging to use average price statistics for Canmore, as the higher end luxury multi-million dollar homes tend to skew the numbers. Without those in the mix, Vincent said “I would say we are closer to a sellers’ market” this summer.
So far this year there have been 297 sales for a total volume of $175 million, a 2.5 per cent increase in transactions over the same time in 2013.
He said entry level products are really hot on the market. For example, townhomes in the $350,000 to $650,000 price range and entry level apartments in the $350,000 to $450,000 range. In 2011, there were over 500 active listings in the entire market and this year Vincent said there were 285 in July.
Single family homes have seen 73 sales this year so far with an average price of $933,000, including a recent sale in Silvertip for $4.35 million – setting a new resale record for single family homes in Canmore.
“People need to be realistic about the market; it is a very strong market, but we are not 2006-07,” he said.
The market is certainly spurring new construction in Canmore, with Spring Creek Mountain Village and Three Sisters Mountain Village moving forward on new projects. While typically designed to meet the needs of second homeowners, there is still a void when it comes to seasonal workers in the tourism industry.
Michel Dufresne, director of the Bow Valley Job Centre, said the bulk of their clients are destination job seekers and the first thing they do is look for a job with accommodation. While providing staff accommodation is popular in Banff, he said it does not have the same appeal to employers in Canmore, making it more challenging to recruit seasonal staff in that community.
“There is not a lot available on the market, so it is very difficult to find staff that are not already in accommodation or who already have a place to live,” Dufresne said.
Occupational demand from August 2013 to January 2014 showed 17.4 per cent demand for food and beverage kitchen workers, 16.2 per cent for trades and labour, 15.2 per cent front line service staff, 12.5 per cent housekeeping and cleaning, 12.2 per cent hotel guest services, 5.6 per cent office and administration. For the same period of time there were 1,748 job orders from businesses in Banff and Canmore and the average wages of a few categories went down compared to the year before. Those included trades and labour jobs, sales and services and office and administration.
