Quebec City has a building stock unlike any other in Québec. In the old central neighbourhoods — Limoilou, Saint-Roch, Saint-Sauveur, Montcalm, Saint-Jean-Baptiste — the landscape is made of older triplexes and plexes packed side by side, in brick, with their staircases, their balconies and their flat roofs. The famous "cube" triplex of Limoilou, lined up street after street along 3e, 4e and 8e Avenues, has almost become a symbol of the city. These buildings have character, personality, and rental demand that rivals any suburb. Yet a large share of them today brings in well below what they'd be worth.
The reason is almost always the same. In Quebec City, a good portion of these plexes belong to owner-occupants — the owner lives in one unit and rents out the other two — or to small investors who own one or two neighbourhood buildings. These are people who know their tenants by their first name, who value peace and stability, and who, year after year, simply never readjusted the rents. A good tenant who has paid on time for ten years in Vieux-Limoilou — you don't touch that. It's human, it's understandable — but it quietly widens a gap.
The result: on the same street in Saint-Sauveur or Montcalm, a renovated unit rents at the market price while the 4½ next door, on a long-standing lease, still pays the rate from several years ago. It's not rare to see a family unit in Limoilou or Vanier rented hundreds of dollars below what a new household would pay today for the apartment across the street. Multiplied across the units of a triplex, the gap becomes enormous — and it brings in nothing while it stays dormant.
On top of that comes very real market pressure. Quebec City is going through a period of rental tension: the vacancy rate is low, demand outstrips supply in sought-after areas, and new leases are being signed at amounts few long-standing landlords would have imagined. Around Sainte-Foy and the edges of Université Laval, student demand and that of young workers keep constant pressure on housing. The catch-up potential is there — you just have to quantify it unit by unit, then go and get it cleanly, without conflict and in compliance with the TAL.
