Renting in West Vancouver, Which Is Two Markets in One Municipality

West Vancouver is usually filed under expensive and left there. The figures say something more specific: it holds both the cheapest way onto the North Shore and the dearest family housing in the region, and they are barely the same market.

What it costs

Every figure on this page rests on a few dozen advertisements, and that is worth saying before anything else. West Vancouver is a small rental market: 198 homes against 615 in North Vancouver and 1,190 in Vancouver. A handful of expensive houses appearing or expiring moves these medians in a way it could not move a larger area's.

There is no studio row because there is no studio market. Three of the 198 are studios, which is too few for the segment page to exist, let alone for a price.

Two markets, one municipality

Downtown's step is nearly as steep but for a different reason: its thirty three-bedrooms are furnished executive rentals rather than family housing. West Vancouver's are houses.

The one-bedroom figure is the one worth pausing on. At $2,250 it is below North Vancouver's $2,300 and below Kitsilano at $2,378. If you want to live on the North Shore and you are renting alone, the cheapest entry is in the municipality with the region's highest reputation for price, in the older low-rise along Marine Drive through Ambleside and Dundarave.

Against the region as a whole, on one-bedrooms alone:

Mostly houses, which is unusual

Of the 85 West Vancouver homes that state a housing type, 48 are houses and 37 are apartment-form. It is the only area we track where houses outnumber flats among the listings that say so.

The bedroom counts say the same thing more bluntly:

56 of 198 homes here have four bedrooms or more. That is what the British Properties and the streets above Marine Drive actually are: detached houses, rented whole, at prices set by what a house costs rather than by any apartment market.

It also explains the floor areas. 178 of the 198 homes state one, a 90% share and the highest we see anywhere, and the median across all of them is 1,495 square feet. A three-bedroom runs a median 2,041 square feet at $3.05 per square foot, which is cheaper per foot than a one-bedroom here at $3.58 and cheaper per foot than almost anything in Vancouver. You are not paying a premium rate for that space. You are paying for a great deal of it at once.

Getting anywhere

There is no SkyTrain on the North Shore and there is no SeaBus terminal in West Vancouver: the SeaBus runs from Lonsdale Quay, which is in North Vancouver. What West Vancouver has is buses, over the Lions Gate Bridge to downtown or east to Park Royal for connections.

The practical consequence is that the bridge decides your commute far more than the address does. Ambleside and the British Properties are a few minutes apart on a map and much the same journey in traffic, because both funnel onto the same crossing. Past Caulfeild towards Horseshoe Bay the distances get real, and nothing in these figures separates a Dundarave flat from a Whytecliff house.

We publish no rent survey for West Vancouver, unlike most areas on this site. There is no Zumper figure in our data for it, so the medians above are the only numbers we have and they are asking rents from advertisements rather than a survey of what tenants pay.

What the buildings offer

The small apartment stock is old, and what it lacks is different from what you might expect. Of the 86 homes that say anything about laundry, 71 say it is in the unit, an 83% share and the highest of any area we have measured. Of the 86 that mention parking, 74 say it is included. Twenty-eight state air conditioning, which at 14% of all homes here is also the highest share we see, and follows from how much of the stock is detached houses rather than 1970s towers.

On pets, 34 say pets are allowed, 4 say cats only and 4 say dogs only. Renting with pets in BC covers what a landlord can and cannot refuse.

Renting a whole house raises questions a flat does not, and they are worth asking at the viewing: who maintains the grounds on a large lot, what the heating is and what it costs across a wet North Shore winter, and whether the rent includes anything at all beyond the building. How house-form rentals work across the region covers that ground properly.

The law does not change with the price. The Residential Tenancy Act covers a $6,795 house exactly as it covers a $1,400 basement suite, including the rent increase cap and the deposit limits, and a deposit is capped at half a month's rent no matter how large that half is.

What this page cannot tell you

The samples are small. 41 one-bedrooms, 59 two-bedrooms, 39 three-bedrooms. Treat every figure here as indicative.

West Vancouver is not one place and we do not publish separate figures for its parts. Ambleside, Dundarave, the British Properties, Caulfeild and Horseshoe Bay are genuinely different markets, and the neighbourhood field on the advertisements we read is free text a landlord typed, too inconsistent to build a table from.

113 of the 198 homes here say nothing about housing type, so the split above describes the 85 that did.

We hold no rent survey for this area, so there is no independent figure to check our medians against, which is not true of most areas on this site.

How we collect and group these listings sets out where the underlying numbers come from and what they leave out.