in

While Mississauga has always been a popular place to settle (the city is home to more than 700,000 residents for a reason), it's fast becoming a costly place to call home.

At a time when the average house price (all home types combined) sits at $750,747 and rental units are rapidly increasing in price (a recent report indicates that monthly rent in Mississauga sits at $1,768 for a one-bedroom apartment and $2,099 for a two-bedroom unit), residents often wonder if speculators and investors are driving prices upward.

While the home affordability crisis is complex and related to a variety of factors (such as low inventory and a lack of purpose-built rental buildings in the GTA overall), the previous provincial government did implement a 15 per cent tax on speculators in a bid to cool the red-hot housing market.

That move begged (and still begs) the question: How many homes are owned by people who do not occupy those households?

According to recently released Statistics Canada data, 35.6 per cent of Mississauga condos are not owner-occupied. Stats Can says that of the 37,920 condominium apartments in Mississauga,13,500 are either vacant, occupied by tenants or used occasionally as secondary homes.

The data was collected by StatsCan for its relatively new Canadian Housing Statistics Program (CHSP), which tracks housing data in Ontario, British Columbia and Nova Scotia.

StatsCan says the CHSP residential property database was developed by combining data from multiple sources (property assessment rolls, land titles, Census of Population, etc.) and provides detailed information at the property and owner levels.

The database, initialized in 2017, is expected to contain information for all properties in every census subdivision nationwide by December 2022.

The program is designed to support the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation's (CMHC) National Housing Strategy.

You can see the data broken down into an interesting infographic here.

According to StatsCan, condos are less likely to be owner-occupied than detached houses. In the Toronto metropolitan census area (or GTA), 63 per cent of condos are owner-occupied versus 91 per cent for single-detached homes.

Not unexpectedly, homeowners in Ontario tend to be older. According to the data, the median age of an Ontario homeowner sits at 54.

Only 15 per cent of millennials (defined as people born between 1980 and 1999) own property in Ontario.