What a unit actually rents for in BC.
What tenants across BC are actually paying — by neighbourhood, city and unit size, with vacancy beside every figure and six years of history behind it.
No areas match. CMHC doesn’t publish every unit size in every area — try “All units”.
Source: CMHC Rental Market Survey — average rents for occupied private apartments. Every figure carries CMHC’s own reliability rating; hollow points on the chart and red labels in the table mark the ones it rates “Fair” or lower, usually a small sample in a small area. Figures CMHC suppressed read “Not published” rather than being estimated.
Survey rent vs asking rent
Most published rent figures are asking rents — an average of whatever happens to be advertised. That average moves with the listing mix: a wave of new studios drags it down while no tenant’s rent changes. These figures come from a survey of occupied units, so a change here means rents moved, not that the advertising did.
The trade-off is speed. Asking rents update monthly; a survey of the whole stock is annual, so treat these as the reliable baseline and asking rents as the early signal.
Why vacancy sits beside rent
A rent figure on its own overstates income. The same $2,600 is worth materially less in a market running 6% vacancy than one at 1%, because the unit spends more of the year empty. The HOMS Property Score applies exactly this discount when it scores yield.
Where the sample is too small to stand behind, CMHC withholds the figure and so do we — those read “Not published” rather than being filled in.
HOMS Real Estate Services Corp. is a technology, intelligence and multidisciplinary services company and is not a licensed real estate brokerage. Licensed real estate trading services are provided by Moji Dargahi, licensed real estate professional with Royal Pacific Realty Corp. HOMS is not an engineering firm: analysis outputs are preliminary screening estimates for informational purposes and are not sealed engineering documents. Tool outputs are estimates for informational purposes only and do not constitute an appraisal, recommendation, financial advice or legal advice.