Where Rentals Are Actually Available in Canada Right Now
Short answer first, then the detail: where rentals are actually available in Canada has moved since 2025. As of the most recent CMHC survey (October 2025, published December 2025), Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver had the loosest rental markets among Canada’s major centres, and the national vacancy rate had climbed to 3.1%, up from 2.2% the year before. That’s the most direct thing this post can tell you, and it’s worth sitting with before the usual warnings about how hard renting is for newcomers, because the picture has actually moved.
Late 2024 and earlier — the tight years. Vacancy sat closer to that 2.2% national figure, and rents were still climbing in most major markets. This is the version of the Canadian rental market most South African forums and Facebook groups are still describing, because it’s the one their members lived through.
October 2025 survey (CMHC, published 11 December 2025) — the turn. National purpose-built vacancy rose to 3.1%. Calgary hit 5.0%, with supply growing 11% — the fastest pace in decades. Edmonton reached 3.8%. Vancouver hit 3.7%, its highest vacancy rate since 1988 — a 37-year high. Greater Toronto sat at 3.0% for purpose-built rentals, though condo rentals stayed tighter at around 1%. Montreal and Halifax didn’t loosen the same way: Montreal’s average rent rose 7.2% and Halifax’s 6.7% over the same period, so the story isn’t uniform across the country.
June 2026 (Rentals.ca, published 8 July 2026) — the trend held. National average asking rent was $2,033 a month across all property types, down 4.3% year-over-year — the 21st consecutive month of annual decline. One-bedroom units nationally averaged $1,779, down 3.1% year-over-year.
What that shift means for you, right now. Landlords in the loosened markets — Calgary and Vancouver especially — have started offering incentives that were rare a few years ago: a free month’s rent, moving allowances, signing bonuses. A newcomer arriving in one of those cities in 2026 has more negotiating leverage than at almost any point since the pandemic. Scarcity, not price alone, has genuinely eased in several of the cities South Africans most often ask about.
What this timeline doesn’t cover
It would be dishonest to stop there. The research behind this post has solid data on vacancy rates by Canadian city for newcomers, but it doesn’t cover the specific mechanics of rental competition in the markets that stayed tight — Montreal and Halifax, notably — or how those practices affect a newcomer without Canadian references specifically. It also doesn’t confirm how a lack of Canadian credit history changes your odds against a local applicant in practice; that’s a real, commonly reported friction point, but this piece can’t put a number or a mechanism to it responsibly. Some readers will genuinely lose out to a locally established applicant even in a looser market — that’s a fair thing to expect going in.
The honest takeaway
Scarcity has eased faster than most emigration content has caught up with. That doesn’t mean renting is easy everywhere in Canada right now — Montreal and Halifax say otherwise — but it does mean the “impossible rental market” framing a lot of South Africans arrive expecting is, in several major cities, a year or two out of date.
Cape2Canada’s guide, Your First 90 Days in Canada, covers the practical side of landing — banking, SIN, credit from zero and those first rentals — in more depth than a vacancy-rate snapshot ever could.