In recent decades, home and rental prices have risen significantly in Canada, raising questions about the role of real estate investors both big and small when it comes to housing affordability.
A Statistics Canada (StatCan) study released Tuesday examined the ways in which individual and institutional investors have changed housing markets across the country for renters and buyers.
The price of properties in Canada nearly doubled in the decade from 2011 to 2021, according to StatCan, citing Canadian Real Estate Association data, while rents rose by 42.6 per cent in that period.
“These pressures on housing affordability were accompanied by a decline in the homeownership rate, which fell from 69 per cent in 2011 to 66.5 per cent in 2021,” the statistics agency said in the study.
“In this context and amid findings from studies showing that real estate investment trusts (REITs) are increasingly present in the rental market, special attention was given to the various actors in the housing market and to the role of real estate investors.”
Affordability concerns
StatCan noted that in the U.S., REITs and other institutional investors “have acquired an increasing number of residential properties in recent years,” putting them in direct competition with ordinary Americans looking to purchase properties, raising affordability concerns.
In Canada, the growing presence of REITs in the housing market has been noted by various other studies in recent decades, according to StatCan. However, the agency’s own study found that small-scale investors still owned the majority of the rental housing stock in the markets that were examined.
Small-scale individual investors owned the largest share of rental properties in every province that was looked at in the study except for Nova Scotia, StatCan said. The agency classifies those investors as anyone who owns five or fewer properties, excluding any whose properties are for personal use.
“In 2022, their share of the assessed value of rental properties ranged from 35.9 per cent in Nova Scotia to 57.1 per cent in Prince Edward Island,” StatCan said in the study.
Still, the growing presence of larger scale investors across the country can lead to concentrated or non-competitive rental markets, StatCan noted in the study, which can contribute to higher baseline rent prices.
However, StatCan’s most recent data from 2022 suggested that rental markets in the 12 areas it analyzed in Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario, Manitoba and British Columbia remained “non-concentrated and competitive.”
The lower concentration aligns with more recent data from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, which found that in 2025, the price difference between units rented by REITs and other types of landlords was not statistically significant, StatCan noted.
Big investors ‘mostly absent’ from housing market
StatCan said that in the non-rental housing market in general, large institutional investors are “mostly absent.”
“In the six provinces studied, the share of the stock of houses owned by institutional investors ranged from 0.1 per cent (Prince Edward Island and Manitoba) to 0.4 per cent (Ontario) in 2022,” StatCan said.
“The ‘house’ category includes single-detached houses, semi-detached houses, row houses and mobile homes. Houses were generally owned by owner-occupants. Otherwise, they were mostly owned by smaller-scale individual investors and individual investors for personal use.”
These findings suggest institutional investors such as REITs have made the majority of their inroads into Canada’s housing market by purchasing rental properties rather than single-family homes.
