FIRST READING: Just as predicted, immigration cuts keep yielding lower rents

Canadian rental prices have almost entirely snapped back from the meteoric highs they hit in the immediate wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and one of the main reasons is that Ottawa is no longer importing record numbers of migrants each year.

Newly released figures from Rentals.ca show that the average Canadian asking rent dropped to $2,034 in September, representing a 4.2 per cent decline over the last year. This makes September the “24th consecutive month of annual decline,” according to the report.

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This puts rental prices right around where they were in the fall of 2022, just before they entered a sustained surge that ultimately peaked in the spring of 2024 at $2,202 per month.

Prior analysis by Rentals.ca has claimed that some of this is due to an increase in supply, with completions of purpose-built rentals recently hitting record highs . But the fact that population growth has slowed to a crawl should “should not be discounted,” it added.

Across Canada, rents have been in decline almost from the moment that the federal government announced in October 2024 that it would be “turning off the taps” on what had previously been the largest migration surge in Canadian history.

In just three years between 2022 and 2025, the Canadian population grew by 2.8 million, an increase driven almost exclusively by increases to both permanent and non-permanent immigration streams.

According to an October 2024 federal backgrounder, “reducing the volume of immigrants will help to alleviate some pressure in the housing markets.”