Metro Vancouver rent data: what is being asked, by area and size

These are asking rents, taken from public rental advertisements as they were posted. An asking rent is a landlord's opening position on a vacant home. CMHC's Rental Market Survey, published each December for the preceding October, measures something different: the rent actually being paid across occupied purpose-built buildings, including tenancies that started years ago and have only ever had BC's capped annual increase applied. Both are real numbers about the same city, and on a one-bedroom they sit hundreds of dollars apart. Our guide to what average rent figures measure sets out both, with sources and dates. Budget against the asking rent; use the survey to understand why the person down the hall pays less.

One row is one home, not one advertisement. The same flat is often posted several times, by the same landlord or by two agents, and counting the copies would weight the market towards whoever reposts most. Advertisements are grouped before anything here is counted, and the grouping deliberately under-merges — a wrong merge deletes somebody's home from the site invisibly, a missed merge is a visible annoyance — so a small number of homes are still counted twice. How the grouping works, and what it cannot see, is set out in full on our page about how we collect and group listings.

Every listing comes from Craigslist, and only listings carrying a price, a photograph and coordinates are published. That is a sample of the market, not a census of it. Purpose-built buildings with their own leasing websites, units filled from a waitlist, and anything let through a property manager who does not advertise here are all absent, and none of them are absent at random.

The middle figure is a median, not an average: the rent in the middle of the selection, with half the homes above and half below. A handful of penthouses pull an average upward far more than they move a median, and this feed has no upper bound to protect it. The quartiles matter more than the middle in any case — they say how much of a spread you are searching inside, which is the thing that decides whether a listing $200 above the median is expensive or ordinary.

Nothing here is published from fewer than twelve homes. Below that a median is one or two listings wearing a statistic's clothes: West Vancouver holds a couple of hundred homes and three studios, and a $3,400 median over those three describes those three and nothing else. The same floor is applied on the area pages and in the checks that keep our published figures honest, so a selection that goes quiet here is quiet everywhere.

An amenity field that is blank means the advertisement did not mention it. It does not mean the home lacks it. Laundry is stated on about 36% of these homes, parking on rather fewer, pets on 13% and air conditioning on 7% — mostly because amenities are read from the full advertisement page, which is not fetched for every listing. Treating silence as a no would hide homes that might be perfect, so the amenity controls here narrow to homes that say yes and tell you, every time, how much of the market that leaves.

Homes with no stated price are counted in the totals and excluded from every rent figure, and the same goes for floor area: the price-per-square-foot view uses only the homes that state a plausible size, which is around eight in ten. Bedroom counts are missing on a small number of advertisements, and those sit outside the bedroom filter rather than being guessed into studio.

What no crawler can see: a home that has been rented while its advertisement stays posted, an incentive such as a month free that makes the effective rent lower than the advertised one, and whatever is excluded from the rent. Parking at $150 and hydro at $60 turn a $2,200 advertisement into a $2,410 month, and neither shows up in any figure on this page.

Measured against the listings we held on 2026-08-12T21:12:10.966Z. Advertisements appear and expire every day and these figures move with them, so this is a picture of what is on the market, not a monthly or annual average.