Vancouver Neighbourhoods, Compared for Renters

Four numbers decide where you can actually rent in Metro Vancouver: what a one-bedroom costs, how long the ride downtown is, when the building went up, and how many rental units exist in the area at all. Judged that way, the West End, Kitsilano and the west side are effectively closed to anyone signing a new lease on a normal income, and the realistic ground is East Vancouver, Burnaby, New Westminster, the Tri-Cities and points east.

Everything below comes from CMHC's Rental Market Survey for October 2025 (published 11 December 2025) and TransLink's published schedule for 8 June to 6 September 2026. CMHC's survey zones do not line up perfectly with neighbourhood names, so the zone used for each row is noted. All rents are for purpose-built rental apartments, not rented condos.

The comparison table

Area	Avg. 1-bed rent, Oct 2025	Vacancy, all units	Built before 1980	Weekday peak ride downtown	Listings
Downtown	$2,112	4.3%	59%	walk	Downtown
West End (West End/Stanley Park zone)	$1,830	1.7%	98%	walk	West End
Kitsilano (Kitsilano/Point Grey zone)	$1,915	1.7%	79%	12 min bus, 4th & Macdonald to Burrard Stn	Kitsilano
Mount Pleasant (with Renfrew Heights)	$1,704	2.5%	52%	7 min, Broadway-City Hall to Waterfront	Mount Pleasant
East Vancouver (East Hastings zone)	$1,692	3.8%	58%	9 min, Commercial-Broadway to Waterfront	East Vancouver
Vancouver CMA average	$1,807	3.7%	66%	—	Vancouver
Metrotown (Central Park/Metrotown zone)	$1,813	not published	86%	19 min	Metrotown
Brentwood (North Burnaby zone)	$1,710	5.6%¹	78%	17 min riding, transfer at Commercial-Broadway	Brentwood
Burnaby, southeast (Edmonds area)	$1,564	3.6%¹	88%	24 min from Edmonds	Burnaby
New Westminster	$1,645	5.8%¹	73%	29 min	New Westminster
North Vancouver (City)	$1,918	2.9%	65%	12 min SeaBus from Lonsdale Quay	North Vancouver
Richmond	$1,676	3.1%	54%	27 min from Richmond-Brighouse	Richmond
Port Moody (Tri-Cities zone)	$1,708	not published	47%	36 min riding, transfer at Commercial-Broadway	Port Moody
Coquitlam (Tri-Cities zone)	$1,708	not published	47%	41 min riding, transfer at Commercial-Broadway	Coquitlam
Surrey	$1,602	4.3%	49%	39 min from Surrey Central	Surrey
Langley (City and Township)	$1,765	3.0%	34%	65 min on the 502 to Surrey Central, then 39 min	Langley

¹ CMHC flags these three vacancy estimates as poor reliability. Treat them as directional. Metrotown and the Tri-Cities zones were suppressed entirely for lack of a reliable estimate.

Transit figures are median scheduled in-vehicle time for weekday departures between 07:15 and 08:45, computed from TransLink's own schedule data. They exclude walking to the station and waiting for the train, which realistically adds 10 to 20 minutes at each end. The Broadway Subway does not appear in that schedule: Millennium Line trains still terminate at VCC-Clark, so the Broadway corridor west of Cambie remains bus-only for now.

The 3.7% vacancy rate is not for you

Metro Vancouver's purpose-built vacancy rate reached 3.7% in October 2025, the highest CMHC has recorded in more than 30 years. That figure has been reported as good news for renters, and for some renters it is. Split it by price and the picture changes:

Rent quartile (Metro Vancouver)	Vacancy rate, Oct 2025
Cheapest 25% of units	1.1%
Second quartile	2.2%
Third quartile	5.0%
Most expensive 25%	6.7%

The slack is in expensive units. If your budget puts you in the bottom half of the market, you are searching a market with roughly 1 to 2% vacancy, which is what Vancouver felt like for the past decade.

There is a second catch. CMHC's average rent is what sitting tenants pay, including people who moved in years ago under a rent that has since only been allowed to rise 2 to 4% a year. What a new tenant is asked to pay is higher, sometimes considerably. Use the table to rank areas against each other, not to predict your own cheque.

Building age decides laundry, heat, and what breaks

The single most useful thing to know about a Metro Vancouver neighbourhood is when its rental buildings were put up, because that decides the things renters actually argue about.

Pre-1980 wood-frame and concrete walk-ups mostly have shared coin laundry, no dishwasher, no in-suite ventilation, and hot water or baseboard heat included in the rent because the building was never individually metered. Post-2000 buildings mostly have in-suite laundry and a dishwasher, and are individually metered, so heat and hot water land on your BC Hydro account under the tiered residential rate. Neither is strictly better. A 1968 West End one-bedroom with heat included and a 2019 Brentwood one-bedroom at the same posted rent are not the same monthly cost, and the older one is often the cheaper of the two once utilities land.

The spread across the region is wide. In the West End, 98% of purpose-built units predate 1980. In Metrotown it is 86%, in Southeast Burnaby 88%, in Kitsilano 79%. At the other end, only 34% of Langley's stock and 47% of the Tri-Cities' predates 1980. If in-suite laundry is a hard requirement, you have quietly ruled out most of the West End and most of Metrotown's purpose-built supply, and you should say so in your search criteria rather than scrolling past 200 listings that will never match.

Which neighbourhoods are effectively closed

Blunt version: if you need a one-bedroom under about $1,700 in the West End, Kitsilano or on the west side, you are not searching a market. You are waiting for an unusual event.

The quartile data by zone shows why. Vacancy in the cheapest quarter of units was 0.0% in the West End, 0.5% in Kitsilano/Point Grey, 0.1% in Mount Pleasant/Renfrew Heights and 0.2% in Westside/Kerrisdale in October 2025. Those units exist. They belong to people who moved in a long time ago and are not leaving, because leaving means giving up a rent that BC law has protected and re-entering the market at today's asking price.

Metrotown and Brentwood deserve a warning of a different kind. Both look affordable in the table, but the table only counts purpose-built rental, and both are dominated by towers full of rented condos that CMHC surveys separately. Across Metro Vancouver, rented condo vacancy was 1.5% in October 2025 against an average two-bedroom rent of $2,900. The purpose-built numbers understate what you will actually be shown in a Brentwood or Metrotown search.

Langley is closed for a different reason again. The rent is not the problem; the 502 bus is. Sixty-five minutes to Surrey Central plus thirty-nine on the Expo Line is a two-hour door-to-door commute in each direction if you work downtown, and the Expo Line extension to Langley is not yet carrying passengers.

What BC law actually gives you

Inside an existing tenancy, the Residential Tenancy Branch caps rent increases at 2.3% for 2026 (it was 3% in 2025). A landlord may raise rent only once every 12 months, must give three full months of written notice, and must use Form RTB-7. Increases above the limit are unlawful unless you agree to them in writing, and you never have to agree. If you have overpaid an unlawful increase, you can deduct it from future rent.

The cap protects a tenancy, not a person. When a unit turns over, the landlord sets the new rent at whatever the market will pay. That is why the cheapest quartile barely moves, why an average rent from CMHC understates what you will be quoted, and why the practical cost of moving neighbourhoods in Metro Vancouver is usually a permanent step up in rent rather than a one-time expense.

What this comparison cannot tell you

CMHC's zones are not neighbourhoods. "East Hastings" covers a lot of ground, "Tri-Cities" bundles Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam and Port Moody into one number, and Brentwood is buried inside "North Burnaby". Averages hide the spread inside each zone, and the October 2025 survey is now nine months old, which matters in a market that has been softening.

None of it tells you whether a specific building has a working elevator, an owner who answers the phone, or a bedroom window facing Kingsway. That part still takes going to look. What the numbers are good for is narrowing sixteen options down to three before you spend a Saturday on it, and being honest with yourself about which three those are. Our live listings feed is the other half of the job, and the guides cover the parts of a BC tenancy that cost people money.