Checked: The NDP Say Rents Are Falling. Really?

On the campaign trail, BC NDP Leader David Eby has been saying something many people might find surprising.

“While rents across Canada are going up, our rents provincially are finally starting to come down,” Eby said in a speech last month. “Here in Vancouver, rents are down six per cent this year.”

Vancouver has had the highest rents in Canada for a long time and the highest rate of forced evictions. Between 2019 and 2024, communities across the province also experienced big rent increases, leading to a housing crisis affecting small towns and big cities alike.

Will Gladman, a renter advocate with the Vancouver Tenants Union, said he was surprised to hear about rents going down.

“I think my first reaction, and the reaction of a lot of people in the tenants union, was a bit of shock,” Gladman said. “I don't know any people recently whose rent is going down.”

Let’s take a closer look at this claim and how it could affect renters.

Where does the six per cent rent drop figure come from?

According to the rental listings site Rentals.ca, the asking price for rents in Vancouver dropped by six per cent between this August and the same month a year ago. Across British Columbia, the asking price for rents dropped by 5.2 per cent.

Rentals.ca found the asking price for rents also dropped in Ontario, by 4.3 per cent. The asking price went up everywhere else, from a 1.6 per cent increase in Quebec to a 20.4 per cent increase in Alberta.

B.C. and Ontario include the two most expensive rental markets in the country. The average one-bedroom listing is $2,737 for Vancouver and $2,445 for Toronto.

Rentals.ca creates its reports by analyzing the prices for apartments listed on its network of sites across Canada. Those listings include apartments, condos, townhouses, single-family homes and secondary suites.

But there’s a big difference between the data Rentals.ca collects and the information that the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. analyzes for its annual rental market survey.

CMHC’s rental market survey tracks the purpose-built rental market, including older apartment buildings. CMHC’s survey also asks landlords what units are actually renting for, while listings data like that of Rentals.ca tracks the price landlords hope to get at the time the unit is vacant.

Because B.C. controls year-to-year rent increases for existing tenants, but doesn’t regulate how much landlords can ask when a unit becomes vacant, CMHC’s results show lower rent rates than Rentals.ca results, which are based on units coming onto the market.

But both data sources are useful. CMHC’s results are collected only once a year, while listings data can give a more up-to-date indication of what’s happening in the rental market.

According to CMHC’s last rental market survey, which was published in January 2024 but is based on data collected in 2023, rental markets across Canada continued to have tight vacancy rates and rising rents. In B.C., rents rose by nine per cent between 2022 and 2023, and rents in Vancouver rose by 10 per cent, according to CMHC’s data.

If rents really are dropping, why?

According to Eby, rents are falling because his government has supported building more rental housing, introduced a $500-million apartment building acquisition program for non-profits and introduced new rules to push municipalities to allow denser housing.

The BC NDP is contrasting its housing policies with those of Conservative Party of BC Leader John Rustad. Rustad has said he backs tax credits to support developers in building more rental housing, but would do away with the rental acquisition fund and would end the provincial requirements for municipalities to densify.

But the decline in asking prices for rentals also corresponds to a steep drop in the number of international students after the federal government lowered the number of student permits by 35 per cent. Landlords in cities like Vancouver and Kingston, Ontario, have reported seeing much less demand from students this year.

And although Rentals.ca tracked a six per cent decline for Vancouver over nine months, in its September report the company says rents are once again rising.

The BC NDP has also taken credit for introducing provincial regulations on short-term rentals using sites like Airbnb, pointing to a study by McGill University researcher David Wachsmuth.

Wachsmuth’s modelling found that short-term rental regulations in B.C. had reduced rents by 5.7 per cent; in Vancouver, according to the study, municipal regulations reduced rents by an average of $147 a month. (The study was commissioned and paid for by the British Columbia Hotel Association, a direct competitor to sites like Airbnb.)

While the BC NDP introduced provincial regulations for short-term rentals, Rustad has said he’ll leave it up to municipalities to decide whether to regulate short-term rentals.

Gladman said it’s important to restrict the number of apartments that can be listed on Airbnb and similar sites, but he said renters he talks to are not seeing any material difference in the rents they’re paying.

Despite years of prodding from renters and advocates, Gladman said, the NDP has still not moved to put in place vacancy control, a type of rent control that limits rent increases when tenants move out. Currently, landlords can rent a vacant unit for an unlimited amount — leading to situations where landlords have evicted or attempted to evict tenants in order to capture higher rents. Only the BC Green Party has promised to introduce vacancy controls.

Stewart Prest, a lecturer in political science at the University of British Columbia, said he won’t be surprised to see the BC NDP continue to take credit when data shows rents dropping, but voters may not be able to see the changes in their lives.

“Part of this problem is perceptual, where British Columbians feel less comfortable with their buying power, with the affordability of all kinds of goods and services,” he said, “including but not limited to housing.”

With files from Christopher Cheung.

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