In Yellowknife, the rental apartment buildings’ days are numbered.

Take a tour through its existing multi-family rental housing, and you’ll find that many of the buildings are aging fast.

According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, just one in four rental buildings in Yellowknife were built this millennium — and of rental structures built before that, more than 40 per cent are in need of repair.

But construction of new rental units has slowed to a crawl — in fact, in the last five years, Yellowknife has added only 20 new rental units, compared with nearly 600 in Whitehorse over the same period.

That’s contributed to the city’s hostile rental market, where rental housing is often in a state of disrepair and is largely controlled by one company.

To an outsider, this might seem puzzling. Yellowknife has some of the lowest vacancies and highest rents in the country — surely that should be attractive to investors.

And its rental market is certainly profitable to some — the city’s biggest landlord, the Northview Canadian High-Yield Residential Fund, isn’t called “high-yield” for nothing.

“In most markets, like in Calgary or Edmonton or whatever, you would just build more stuff,” said Rob Warburton, co-founder of CloudWorks, a Yellowknife real estate investment company. “There’s high demand, which we generally have, and rental rates are high.”

“But you can’t here…. You can’t because construction’s too high, costs are too high and access to land is challenging.”

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