A new Statistics Canada study challenges assumptions about who owns Canada's rental housing
Institutional real estate investors — the large trusts and private funds that have drawn growing public scrutiny — remain a marginal presence in Canada's housing market, according to Statistics Canada (StatCan).
The report, drawn from the agency's Canadian Housing Statistics Program (CHSP) for the 2022 reference year, found that small-scale individual investors continue to own the largest share of rental properties across the six provinces examined: Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario, Manitoba, and British Columbia.
The findings arrive as housing affordability remains one of the most consequential issues facing mortgage brokers and their clients.
Property prices across Canada nearly doubled between 2011 and 2021, according to StatCan citing Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) data, while rents climbed 42.6% over the same period.
The national homeownership rate fell from 69% in 2011 to 66.5% in 2021, underscoring the mounting difficulty of ownership for ordinary Canadians.
The question of who bears responsibility for those pressures has increasingly pointed toward investor activity, particularly real estate investment trusts (REITs) and large institutional buyers. But StatCan's 2022 data tells a more nuanced story.
Small landlords hold the reins
Across the six provinces studied, small-scale individual investors held the largest share of rental property assessed value in all provinces except Nova Scotia.
Small-scale individual investors are defined as anyone owning up to five investment properties. Their share of the rental market in 2022 ranged from 35.9% in Nova Scotia to 57.1% in Prince Edward Island.
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.
London registered the highest HHI of the group at 133.9, and Halifax at 80.2; both well below the threshold. Toronto and Vancouver had the least concentrated rental markets of all CMAs studied.
Those results align with a 2025 Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) report, which found that rent prices charged by REITs were not statistically different from those of other landlords after controlling for relevant variables in Canada's three largest CMAs.
CMHC did note, however, that if REITs were to concentrate ownership within specific neighbourhoods, they could gain the leverage to drive rents higher in those areas, a risk the StatCan study acknowledged may not be fully visible at the CMA level.
Institutional investors are also making deeper inroads in newer rental supply. In Nova Scotia, they controlled 63.1% of the assessed value of rental properties built since 2011; in New Brunswick, 61.5%.
That trend reflects a pattern identified by CMHC and other researchers showing that REITs have increasingly focused on recently completed, purpose-built rental stock rather than acquiring resale houses.
The StatCan findings suggest that, for now, Canada's rental market is shaped more by thousands of small individual landlords than by the large institutional forces reshaping housing in other countries. But with institutional investors claiming a growing portion of newly built rental stock, that balance may shift in the years ahead.
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