Canadian homeowners as rentals hit record high
2025: CMHC
New rental units are more than doubling new houses being built in Canada. If trends continue, 2025 is on track to set a 30-year low in housing starts across the country.
Homeowner housing starts in 2025 show an average annualized rate of new builds at its lowest since 1995. The home ownership dreams of Canadians are being crushed. If the average monthly rate continues, there will be 51,545 new units started in 2025, nearly half the starts of the high of 2002’s 102,038, and a continued downward trajectory of houses built over the past two decades.
Rental unit starts, hit an annual record high of 87,971 within the first 10 months of 2025, which would translate to an annual rate of 105,565 new rental units for all of 2025.
Over the last few years, purpose-built rental has become a lot more profitable than building high-rise condos. It’s just gotten difficult for a lot of places to build single-detached, because of high taxes, development charges, land use policies.
The challenge is that prices are so low now that they don’t cover the cost of construction, which is one of the reasons why sales have basically evaporated, because the builders and developers have gotten to a point where they just can’t produce product and make it profitable and get financing,” in Toronto, the GTA, then metro Vancouver as the cities where housing starts have dried up the most.
Full Read:
- https://thehub.ca/2025/11/21/housing-starts-for-canadian-homeowners-set-to-hit-30-year-low-as-rentals-hit-record-high-in-2025-cmhc/