What Every Burnaby Neighbourhood Does for a Living: A Map of 20,000 Business Licences

The most common business licence in Burnaby isn't for a restaurant, a shop or a clinic. It's for a rented-out house. Of the City's 20,202 approved business licences, 4,303 are house rental licences, the permit an owner needs to rent out a house or duplex they don't live in.

That's the first thing I noticed when I put every licence on a map of Burnaby's 20 community plan areas. The second: every area has a personality. Big Bend is a stockroom. Lake City is a lab. Royal Oak is a garage with a taxi fleet parked behind it. South Slope has 272 rented-out houses and not one restaurant licence. Here's the map, a "what do you do?" neighbourhood finder and a quiz, plus what it all means if you're buying a house in Burnaby with a suite, a home office or an Airbnb plan in mind.

The map

Burnaby publishes every approved business licence with its location. I placed each one inside the City's community plan areas, the 20 districts it uses for planning (they're bigger than MLS® neighbourhoods; Metrotown here takes in the mall and the towers around it, the Heights is Hastings Street and the streets around it). Metrotown is the densest by a long way: 674 licences per square kilometre, against 526 in Brentwood and 16 on Burnaby Mountain, which is mostly forest and SFU.

Switch to Rented-out houses and the map flips: the towers fade and the single-family belts light up, from the Heights in the northwest to Garden Village, South Slope and Holdom. Switch to Restaurants and it flips again, back to Metrotown (207), Brentwood (80) and the Heights (77).

Each area's signature licence

Counting the most common licence in each area is boring: it's rented-out houses almost everywhere outside the town centres. So I used the trick from my Vancouver storefront map: for each area, which licence type shows up most often compared with Burnaby as a whole? Big Bend's warehouses are 6.0 times as common there as across the city, which makes them Big Bend's signature. The nicknames are mine.

A few that made me laugh. Royal Oak would have won with taxis if I'd let it: 162 of Burnaby's 164 per-vehicle passenger licences sit at a single Sidley Street address, because the City licenses the Bonny's Taxi fleet one vehicle at a time. Even without them, Royal Oak is Burnaby's garage, with 78 auto repair and body shops, 4.8 times the city rate. Lake City has 30 of the city's 86 research labs, Big Bend (22) and Broadview (21) come next, and Broadview adds 13 parking lot licences, which earns it the lab-coats-and-parking-lots nickname. Brentwood has 30 engineering offices. Metrotown is where you go to get things done: shops, banks and financial services, opticians and 28 law offices.

And Burnaby Mountain's signature is restaurants (32 of its 180 licences), which is what a university campus looks like in licence form: lunch.

What Burnaby licenses most

Leaving aside trade licences, after rented-out houses and home businesses come general offices and registered therapists (1,064, 5 times the 212 dentists). Another 2,150 licences belong to businesses based outside Burnaby, which the City places at a single placeholder point, so they're in the totals but not on the map. Most are contractors: 1,781 of the unmapped licences are building, electrical, plumbing and other contractor licences.

Where the rented-out houses are

Burnaby asks owners who rent out a single-family house or duplex, and don't live there themselves, to buy an annual house rental licence (City of Burnaby). So this layer is a rough map of absentee-owner houses. The Heights has the most, 626. As a share of everything licensed, South Slope leads: 62% of its licences are rented-out houses. In seven mostly residential areas (South Slope, Garden Village, Montecito, Buckingham Heights, Deer Lake, Holdom and Lochdale), rental houses are 40% or more of all licences, and East Burnaby is just under at 39.8%. The seven hold 1,750 rental licences between them.

Two caveats. Not every rented house is licensed, so the true numbers are higher, and the gap could be bigger in some areas than others. And only owners who don't live on the property need one, so a house with a rented suite and the owner upstairs isn't in this count. Of the 4,302 mapped rental licences, 454 are on strata properties and nearly all the rest on regular lots.

My read: in an area where a third to a half of all licences are rented-out houses, a lot of the owners on your future street won't be your neighbours. That's worth knowing before you buy, whether you see it as quieter blocks of tenants or as houses an investor might sell next. For rents and vacancy across the region, see my Vancouver rental market update.

Short-term rentals: Burnaby's spare rooms

Burnaby has 443 short-term rental licences, and the rules are tight: principal residence only, up to 90 nights a year, of which only 28 can be the whole home; strata units need the strata council's written permission; homes with a secondary suite don't qualify; up to four unrelated guests; fines of up to $500 per infraction. The result is a map of spare rooms, not investor condos. The Heights leads with 83, then East Burnaby (42) and Buckingham Heights (40). The Metrotown plan area, home to the MLS® neighbourhood with the most listings on EstateBlock (378 on 2026-11-06), has 21. 363 of the 443 are on regular lots and 76 in strata buildings.

The province has its own short-term rental rules on top of the City's. I covered them on my own blog: short-term rental rules in BC.

Home-based businesses: the kitchen-table economy

2,993 Burnaby businesses are licensed to run out of a home. Edmonds has the most (407), then Metrotown (352) and the Heights (290). They're not all in houses: 1,155 are on strata properties, so plenty of those home offices are condos and townhouses. On Burnaby Mountain, 46% of all licences are home-based.

The City's rules are worth knowing before you buy with a business in mind: only people who live at the address can work in the business, no more than one customer and one customer vehicle at a time, no sign that the home is anything but a home, and no manufacturing. In R1 to R8 residential districts you can keep one truck or commercial vehicle up to 4,500 kg, in the rear yard only (City of Burnaby).

Find your Burnaby neighbourhood

Tell me what you do and I'll tell you where your people are. It's the same data, flipped around. “Your crowd” is about concentration, so it can differ from the signature table: engineers make up a bigger share of Central Valley's licences than of Brentwood's, even though Brentwood has more of them.

What it means if you're buying in Burnaby

On 6 November 2026, EstateBlock showed 1,978 homes for sale in Burnaby, including 1,077 condos, 218 townhouses and 423 houses (active listings, asking prices). The licence map is a decent cheat sheet for which kind of street you're looking at.

Browse all Burnaby listings, or zoom in: Metrotown and Brentwood for condos near the action, Edmonds for the home-office crowd, and South Slope, Montecito, Garden Village, Buckingham Heights or Deer Lake for the house streets (MLS® neighbourhood boundaries don't match the City's areas exactly). For prices, my Burnaby real estate market update has this month's numbers.

How I did this

Data: the City of Burnaby's Business Licences layer, every approved licence with its location (20,202 on 2026-11-06; 19,061 with a licence term starting in 2026 and 1,141 in December 2025). I placed each point inside the City's Community Plan Area Boundaries with a point-in-polygon test. 2,150 non-resident licences sit at a single placeholder point and 21 more have an unknown or unmappable address, so 18,031 are on the map. Areas in km² come from the same polygons and include parks and water inside them, which is why Burnaby Mountain looks empty.

Signature licence is a location quotient: an area's share of a licence type divided by Burnaby's share. It needs at least 8 licences of that type in the area and 30 across the city. I grouped licence types that differ only by size (restaurants by seats, retail and warehouses by staff) and left out types that describe paperwork more than place: not-for-profits, general offices, apartment licences, inter-municipal trade licences, miscellaneous resident licences, adult care facilities, vending machines, mobile vendors and the single taxi fleet.

A licence is not a business count: one company can hold several, and unlicensed rentals and businesses are invisible here. I didn't name any home-based business or rental owner, and the published research file holds counts only. The jokes are about streets and licence types, not the people behind them. Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Burnaby.