During the last decade, small-scale landlords have far outpaced institutional investors in Canada’s rental market, data from Statistics Canada shows.
In the United States, the role of Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) has come under scrutiny as large companies buy up large shares of the housing market, but the picture looks very different in Canada, Statistics Canada said.
“Small-scale investors (individuals) owned the largest share of investment properties in terms of assessed value across all the provinces studied, except Nova Scotia,” the report said.
The report defines “small-scale investor” as an individual who owns up to five properties, while an institutional investor is defined as the top 0.1 per cent of investors in terms of the assessment value of investment properties owned in the province.
The second category consists mainly of businesses, including REITs, pension funds, private funds and large family-owned businesses.
Small-scale investors owned around half of all rental properties in British Columbia (49.4 per cent), Ontario (52.6 per cent) and Prince Edward Island (57.1 per cent) by 2021.
In contrast, institutional investors owned 20.3 per cent, 23.6 per cent and 16.6 per cent, respectively, in these three provinces.
The high number of condominium apartments in B.C. and Ontario has made them more accessible to small-scale investors, the report added.
According to a 2023 TD Bank report, large investors accounted for around 30 per cent of all houses bought in Canada last year.
The rise of small-scale investors, sometimes referred to as “mom-and-pop investors,” coincided with property values doubling (94 per cent rise) between 2011 and 2021 and rents going up 42 per cent.
The term “mom-and-pop” investors “sentimentalizes” housing investment, Whitzman said.
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“We tend to sentimentalize small landlords. There are good small landlords, absolutely. But there’s a lot of really bad, small-scale landlords, and they appear to be able to act with near impunity,” she said.
However, having a rental market where the supply isn’t concentrated in a few hands may be a good thing, said Royal Bank of Canada economist Rachel Battaglia.
“Low market concentration is a positive; you want some healthy market competition when it comes to market share. So no one group or individual really has all the power to control what’s going on in the market,” she said.
There are a few caveats to remember with Wednesday’s Statistics Canada study, Battaglia said.
First, the study looks at the value of the rental market that is held by a certain number of landlords, not the number of housing units.
“This could suggest that landlords owning an expensive penthouse apartment could own a similar share of the overall rental market value as many landlords that own several smaller-scale apartments,” she said.
The other caveat is that the data is from 2022, when Canada’s most recent real estate boom was at its peak, and the housing market looks very different today.
“I suspect many investors, including mom and pop investors, were potentially jumping into the market, trying their hand at real estate investment or expanding their portfolios as well,” she said.
High investor demand in 2021 and 2022 also meant a higher supply of rental development projects, Battaglia said.
“That influx of supply is part of the reason why asking rents currently and recently have been falling in the city,” she added.
On Wednesday, average asking rents across Canada in June fell 4.3 per cent to $2,033 in June compared with the same period in 2025, according to Rentals.ca and Urbanation. This marked the 21st consecutive month of falling rents.
“Canada’s rental market continued to show signs of improvement in June, with rents rising for a third straight month and the pace of annual declines easing from earlier in the year,” said Shaun Hildebrand, president of Urbanation.
Part of the solution to make rental housing more affordable for Canadians is to increase housing supply, Battaglia said.
To rapidly build up supply, governments must mobilize capital to kickstart the building of rental housing, Whitzman said
“You need mission-oriented organizations, either governments or non-profit organizations that receive some kind of low-cost financing or grants from the governments to be providing that housing while the housing crisis sorts itself out,” she said.
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