BURST
B.C.’s housing minister is touting NDP government policy as the reason behind a drop in apartment rents over the past three years, but experts say federal immigration restrictions likely played an outsized role.
In a Tuesday interview with Postmedia, Christine Boyle cited the government’s efforts to increase construction of purpose-built rentals and implementation of restrictions on short-term rentals as a major reason for the 12.1 per cent drop in B.C. apartment rental prices since early 2023 recorded by Rentals.ca in a recent report.
She said Vancouver apartment rents had fallen 7.9 per cent over the past year and dropped 13.8 per cent over three years.
“The work that we’re doing as a government on cracking down on speculation and ensuring homes are available for people in communities, the work that we’re doing to reduce red tape and see more homes built in communities around the province, in partnership with local governments and with homebuilders, the work that we’re doing to protect and support renters,” said Boyle.
“All of it is making a difference, and It’s returning money to the pocketbooks of renters.”
The rentals.ca report showed average rents for December 2025 in Canada were $2,069, a 2.3 per cent drop over the same period in 2024, with average rents in Alberta falling by 4.3 per cent over the last year and rents in Ontario not far behind as rents fell by 3.9 per cent.
For Vancouver, the average rent in December 2025 was $2,664, a fall of 7.5 per cent from December 2024, driven by an over 10 per cent drop in the asking price for three-bedroom units. Overall, B.C.’s average rents dropped by 5.8 per cent over the last year.
Vancouver and Toronto rents hit their lowest levels since early 2022, while Edmonton was the only major city to post rent rises.
Recent data from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation also showed that vacancy rates in Greater Vancouver have increased to 3.7 per cent, with Greater Victoria not far behind at 3.3 per cent.
Real estate consultant Michael Geller said that while B.C. government policies have helped drive rents down, new restrictions on immigration have played a large factor.
Statistics Canada’s third-quarter population estimates found that B.C.’s overall population dropped by a net 14,335 people between July and October of last year, mainly driven by net drop of 17,243 non-permanent residents.
“The demand for rental housing has come down quite a bit as a result of the reduction in foreign students and just generally, because of reduced immigration,” said Geller.
Geller said B.C. changes to allow multi-unit developments on many single family lots have resulted in a proliferation of purpose-built rentals and municipal plans like the one for Broadway in Vancouver have led to the development of apartment buildings in urban centres.
UBC Professor Tom Davidoff agreed with Geller, saying provincial policies have been important but immigration has played a much larger factor, while acknowledging that “disentangling all that causality is challenging.”
“It’s not inappropriate for the government to point to their supply and demand policies. At the same time, you would want to recognize that part of the reason B.C. fell more in rents is we have a larger immigrant population, and so a reduction in immigration will have a larger effect here,” said Davidoff.
It isn’t just Vancouver and Victoria, however, that are seeing a drop in rents, with the Rentals.ca report also recording decreases in other cities such as New Westminster, Coquitlam and Kelowna.
The fall in rental pricing comes as Metro Vancouver’s housing market recorded its lowest number of home sales in two decades, according to Greater Vancouver Realtors , with average prices also falling.
Economic uncertainty, combined with a market with ultra expensive homes that are no longer appealing to speculators, are a few reasons behind the downward trend, real estate observers say.
Geller said a side-effect of the strong purpose-built rental market is that it has essentially killed the condo market and led to a loss of jobs in industries like construction that rely on real estate growth for much of their work.
“There’s a reluctance to proceed with new projects, both on the part of the developers and the lenders,” he said, warning that the decline in housing starts this will cause could mean any reduction in rents is short-lived.
“If these condo projects don’t proceed and if the rental projects can’t proceed, we could well see an increase in rent, say, three years from now, for the same reasons that we saw rental increases over the last few years, just an imbalance between supply and demand.”
Penny Gurstein, a professor emeritus and former director of the school of community and regional planning at UBC, said the government needs to work to make its economy less reliant on the old model of real-estate development premised on investors buying properties.
Instead, she said the focus should be on housing diversification and building up co-op and non-market housing on public land.
“Instead of sort of having a real estate market with sort of a residual of non-profit and other kinds of things, we need to be thinking about a housing system that provides various opportunities for people,” said Gurstein, who added that housing should be seen as a kind of social infrastructure, just like roads and transit, in order to have a healthy society and a healthy economy.
With file from Joanne Lee-Young