Who really owns Canada’s rental housing? StatCan has an answer
In both Ontario and British Columbia, small-scale individual investors held roughly half of all rental property value, supported in those provinces by a large stock of condominium apartments more accessible to smaller investors.
In the broader owner-occupied housing market, institutional investors — the top 0.1% of investors by assessed value — were largely absent. Their share of the total stock of houses, encompassing single-detached, semi-detached, row houses, and mobile homes, ranged from just 0.1% in Prince Edward Island and Manitoba to 0.4% in Ontario in 2022.
Rental markets remain competitive despite REIT growth
Institutional investors do hold a more notable foothold in the rental segment. In Nova Scotia, they controlled 38% of the assessed value of rental properties in 2022; in Manitoba, 33.6%; and in New Brunswick, 31.4%.
At the metropolitan level, Halifax recorded the highest institutional rental share among the 12 census metropolitan areas (CMAs) analysed at 54.3%, followed by London at 46.5% and Winnipeg at 45%.
Yet ownership concentration alone does not determine whether a rental market is competitive. StatCan applied the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), a standard measure of market concentration, and found all 12 CMAs remained non-concentrated and potentially competitive in 2022, none exceeding the 1,500 threshold that signals moderate concentration.
