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.