New ranking reveals B.C.'s most in-demand city for renters and it isn't Vancouver
The top cities for renter demand in Canada have just been revealed, and Vancouver isn’t one of them.
RentCafe.com, a rental search website, analyzed its rental listing data across 25 cities over the third quarter of 2026, then ranked them on a “city-level rental interest score,” looking at available listings, listing views, favourites, and saved searches.
Neither Vancouver nor any other of Canada’s largest rental markets were in the top 10 cities in Q3 — following the trend from the year’s second quarter.
“Vancouver, Montreal, Edmonton, and Calgary remain in high demand, but year-over-year engagement continued to fall across the group,” reads the report from RentCafe.
Vancouver fell from 13th to 16th place. Its rental availability increased by four per cent compared to the year before, page listings declined by 34 per cent, favourited listings by 52 per cent, and saved searches by 37 per cent.
RentCafe found that interest in Vancouver apartments comes from locals, as well as people in Calgary, Surrey, and Toronto.
Heads turning to different B.C. cities
But if renter interest in Vancouver is declining, one B.C. city is surging.
Victoria sits at number two on RentCafe’s list, which the organization describes as the city’s “best placement since the ranking began.”
Rental availability fell by a whopping 57 per cent from the year prior. And while both saved searches (down 13 per cent) and page views (down 27 per cent) declined, RentCafe said that this was a “milder pullback than in most markets.”
Nanaimo is another B.C. city that cracked the top 10, even though its popularity fell from the previous quarter from eighth to 10th place.
Nanaimo had the lowest availability in all 25 cities, with posted listings down 28 per cent from the prior year. Its page views also dropped by almost 40 per cent.
“Although Nanaimo has the lowest availability rate of all 25 cities — the fewest listings relative to the size of its rental market — it ranks third for this metric, behind Victoria and Guelph,” wrote RentCafe.
“That’s because the availability score also reflects the year-over-year change in the share of available apartments, and listings in both of those cities fell far more sharply than in Nanaimo.”
The only other B.C. city on RentCafe’s list is Kelowna, which was number 20 on the list and ahead of major cities like Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal.