Institutional investors hold outsized share only in Nova Scotia and a handful of cities
Small-scale individual landlords remain the backbone of Canada's rental housing stock, according to new Statistics Canada data that complicates the narrative around institutional investors squeezing out mom-and-pop owners.
The study, part of the Canadian Housing Statistics Program's ongoing look at the 2022 reference year, examined investor concentration across Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario, Manitoba and British Columbia.
It defines an investor as anyone who owns at least one residential property that is not their principal residence, and splits owners into six size categories, from personal-use investors up to institutional investors, the top 0.1% of owners by assessed property value.
Across five of the six provinces studied, small-scale individual investors, those owning five properties or fewer, held the largest share of assessed value among rental properties. Their share ranged from 35.9% in Nova Scotia to 57.1% in Prince Edward Island. Nova Scotia was the exception, where institutional investors, primarily real estate investment trusts, pension funds, private funds and large family businesses, controlled the biggest slice at 38.0%.
Houses, meanwhile, barely register on institutional balance sheets. Across the six provinces, institutional ownership of the housing stock, a category covering detached, semi-detached and row houses along with mobile homes, ranged from just 0.1% in Prince Edward Island and Manitoba to 0.4% in Ontario, or roughly four houses in every thousand.
Newer construction told a different story in some markets. Institutional investors accounted for more than half the assessed value of rental properties built since 2011 in Nova Scotia (63.1%) and New Brunswick (61.5%). Ontario broke that pattern, where small-scale individual investors were more likely to own recently built rental stock, a difference StatCan attributes to the province's heavier reliance on condominium construction over purpose-built multi-unit rentals.
City-level data flagged Winnipeg, London and Halifax as the markets where institutional landlords carry the most weight, owning 45.0%, 46.5% and 54.3% of rental property value respectively. Toronto and Vancouver sat at the opposite end, with small-scale individual investors holding the largest share of any group in nine of the 12 major metros studied.
Despite that concentration in certain cities, StatCan's competition analysis, using the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, found none of the 12 largest metros qualified as concentrated markets. London posted the highest score at 133.9, still well under the 1,500 threshold that would flag a moderately concentrated market. The agency noted the measure does not capture potential coordination through rent-setting software or concentration within individual neighbourhoods.
Rent pressure and financial precarity
The StatCan release lands alongside a separate modelling study from Centraide of Greater Montreal, which estimates a hypothetical 6% rent increase across the Montreal region could push more than 30,000 people into financial precarity, with over 16,000 facing extreme hardship.
The organization's president and chief executive, Tasha Lackman, said the situation has grown more urgent since Centraide launched its Together for Housing initiative in 2023, noting rising demand for community services and visible strain from housing costs.
"Three years after Together for Housing was introduced, the situation is more urgent than ever. The demand for organizations' services has surged (as shown by the Financial Anxiety Index data) and the impacts of housing costs are increasingly visible, with families being displaced, individuals pushed to the brink financially and workers unable to find a decent place to live," Lackman said.
The modelling, built by RUNWITHIT Synthetics using a synthetic population dataset for the region, identified Ville-Marie and Le Plateau-Mont-Royal as the most exposed boroughs, with extreme-precarity rates of 43% and 34% respectively under the rent-increase scenario.
