Twenty straight months of annual declines. A summer leasing season that has barely shown up. And a market that looks completely different depending on where you own and what you own. Here is everything investors need to know from the June 2026 Rentals.ca report.
The Savvy Investor Team · thesavvyinvestor.ca · June 2026 · 8 min read
| Avg. asking rent (May 2026) $2,029/mo ↓ 4.7% year-over-year | Consecutive annual declines 20 months Streak since Oct 2024 | Drop from peak (May 2024) −7.8% Peak was $2,202 | Above Apr 2021 COVID low +22.1% Low was $1,662 |
May was supposed to be the turning point. It wasn’t. The June 2026 National Rent Report from Rentals.ca and Urbanation landed with the same headline it’s had for over a year: rents are down again. The national average asking rent came in at $2,029 per month in May — a 4.7% drop from a year ago, and the 20th consecutive month of annual rent declines. That’s not a blip. That’s a trend.
The timing is what makes this one sting. May is the start of peak leasing season — the stretch where historically, landlords get a little leverage back as tenants scramble for units. Over the past five years, May has averaged a month-over-month rent bump of 1.3%. This year it came in at 0.1%. The seasonal lift that landlords were counting on to close out a rough stretch? It didn’t materialize.
To be clear about where things stand: at $2,029, rents are 7.8% off the peak of $2,202 set in May 2024, but still 22.1% above the April 2021 COVID-era low of $1,662. This is a correction, not a collapse — but it’s a correction that demands you update your numbers.
Figure 1: Average asking rent — all residential property types (CAD/month). Source: Rentals.ca / Urbanation, June 2026
Purpose-built vs. condos: two very different stories
The national average is a useful starting point, but the split between purpose-built rental apartments and investor-owned condo rentals is where the data gets genuinely actionable. These two segments are not moving together — and the gap is growing.
Purpose-built apartment asking rents fell 3.4% year-over-year to $2,031. Condo apartment asking rents dropped nearly twice as fast — 6.8% year-over-year to $2,076. Condos are still averaging higher on a per-unit basis, but they are losing ground significantly faster.
Figure 2: Year-over-year rent change by property type (May 2026). Source: Rentals.ca / Urbanation, June 2026
The reason is structural. Purpose-built buildings are run by operators who built them to be rentals. Different financing, longer-tenured residents, and the ability to ride out a soft patch without panicking. Condo investors are in a different spot entirely. Many bought at peak valuations with variable-rate mortgages, so a vacant unit is a carrying cost problem that needs to be solved fast. Drop the price, get it filled. When thousands of condo investors are making that same call at the same time across Toronto and Vancouver, you end up with a segment that moves faster and further than purpose-built.
CMHC put it plainly in their 2026 mid-year update: “competition from investor-owned rental condominium apartments, which is higher than usual, is further slowing absorption in larger markets.” For anyone looking at new acquisitions, that performance gap is worth paying attention to.
Province by province: same country, very different conditions
Canada does not have one rental market right now. Annual apartment rent declines are concentrated in the country’s largest provinces — British Columbia at −5.4%, Ontario at −5.0%, and Alberta at −4.7%. Quebec is roughly flat at −0.8%. Meanwhile, Manitoba is up 2.1% and Saskatchewan is up 0.4%.
Figure 3: Year-over-year apartment rent change by province (May 2026). Source: Rentals.ca / Urbanation, June 2026
The markets holding up are the ones that didn’t absorb the same supply surge, weren’t as dependent on temporary resident demand, and started from lower rent levels to begin with. For investors spread across multiple provinces, this divergence is the most important thing in the report. The national number is an average of very different local stories.
City by city: where it is hitting hardest
Kelowna is down 11.6% year-over-year on one-bedrooms. Victoria is off 9.3%. Burnaby is down 6.8%. Vancouver one-bedrooms have fallen 6.3%, and the city has now seen annual rent declines for 30 consecutive months straight. Metro Vancouver’s purpose-built vacancy rate hit 3.7% — the highest it’s been since 1988.
Toronto is down 5.0% on one-bedrooms, for the same condo-driven reasons. Calgary and Edmonton are softer but more contained at −3.0% and −2.0% respectively. On the other end, Halifax is up 4.0% and Winnipeg is up 3.0% — tighter supply, steadier local demand, and rents that never got stretched to the same levels in the first place.
Figure 4: Year-over-year one-bedroom rent change by city (May 2026). Source: Rentals.ca / Urbanation, June 2026
Three forces driving the decline
Population demand has dried up. For years, newcomer demand — international students, temporary workers, new permanent residents — was the engine running underneath Canada’s rental market. That engine has been deliberately throttled. The federal government cut planned temporary resident arrivals by roughly 43% for 2026, and the numbers are already showing up in the data: the non-permanent resident population dropped from a peak of 3.15 million in October 2024 to 2.68 million by January 2026. BC has already seen a small net population decline. RBC Economics is projecting that overall population growth could stall entirely this year.
Supply is still arriving from a different era. The apartment completions hitting the market right now were greenlit in 2020 to 2022, when rents were climbing 10% a year and the math looked very different. That pipeline is still working its way through. CMHC confirmed in their 2026 mid-year update that completions in early 2026 are running above the same period last year, and vacancy rates are highest in buildings completed after 2020 — the newest stock competing hardest in the softest conditions.
The economy is not helping. Peak leasing season depends on people actually moving — new jobs, school, life transitions. When the economic backdrop is uncertain, people stay put and wait. Urbanation president Shaun Hildebrand summed it up: “The Canadian rental market is heading into the peak summer season under a weak economic backdrop, a decreasing population, and record apartment completions, which are all working together to keep rent increases softer than what is typical for this time of year.”
“The question heading into the summer leasing season is whether July and August demand will provide the seasonal lift it typically would.” — Urbanation / Rentals.ca, June 2026
What this means if you own rentals right now
A few things worth keeping in mind before you make any moves based on this data.
First: asking rents and what you’re actually collecting are two different numbers. Asking rents move fast — they reflect what landlords are listing available units at. The average rent across all the occupied units in your building moves much more slowly, because most of your tenants aren’t renegotiating downward every year. If you’re fully tenanted with long-term residents, your actual income may barely be moving. What this report is describing is the margin, not necessarily what’s happening inside your portfolio today.
YOUR NEXT VACANCY
Budget for a longer turn time and a lower re-tenanting rent than you got last time. In Metro Vancouver and condo-heavy parts of Toronto, landlord incentives — free first month, reduced deposits, signing bonuses — are common enough now that you need to build them into your vacancy projections, not treat them as a worst case.
UNDERWRITING NEW ACQUISITIONS
If you’re running numbers on a deal using 2024 rent comps, those figures are likely overstating your income by 5 to 8%. Pull current listings in the specific neighbourhood, use those as your baseline, then stress test another 5% lower. If the deal doesn’t hold up under that scenario, it deserves a harder look before you move forward.
GEOGRAPHIC DIVERSIFICATION
Investors with holdings in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, or Atlantic Canada are in a materially different rental market right now than those concentrated in Metro Vancouver or the Toronto condo segment. If your portfolio is heavily weighted in one province or one asset type, this report is a good moment to ask whether that concentration is a risk you’ve actually priced in.
The bigger picture
Twenty months of falling asking rents is a real correction. But rents at $2,029 are still 22% above the April 2021 low. The market overshot during the immigration-driven demand surge, and it’s now correcting. That’s a different thing from a structural breakdown in rental housing fundamentals.
The supply wave is also running out of road. Condo starts in Vancouver are already down 13% and developers across the country are pulling back on projects that don’t pencil at current rents and construction costs. The units completing now are the back end of a pipeline that was set in motion in a very different market. As it thins out and absorption catches up, the setup for stabilization is building — it’s just not here yet.
Permanent immigration is also still running at 380,000 per year through 2028. The cuts have been almost entirely on the temporary resident side. Permanent residents still arrive, still need somewhere to live, and still overwhelmingly rent when they first get here. That underlying demand isn’t gone.
What’s being tested right now is pretty simple: are you working from current numbers, or the ones from two years ago? The data isn’t hard to find. Using it is the job.
Data: Rentals.ca / Urbanation National Rent Report (June 2026), RBC Economics, CMHC 2026 Mid-Year Rental Market Update, Statistics Canada. For informational purposes only — not financial or investment advice.
