Vancouver Housing Starts: Condo Starts Down 32%, Rentals Take Over, and a Record 6,291 Unsold New Homes (September 2026)

Metro Vancouver had 6,291 brand-new homes sitting finished and unsold at the end of September. That's the highest count in CMHC's monthly records, which go back to January 1990. A year ago it was 4,441. Two years ago, 2,833.

At the same time, builders are still breaking ground. CMHC's September numbers, released October 16, show 2,491 housing starts in the Vancouver area, up from 1,968 last September. But look at what is being started and the picture changes. Condo starts are down 32% this year. Purpose-built rental starts are up 41%. For the first nine months of 2026, more rental units were started than condos, something that hasn't happened in any calendar year since at least 1990.

Here's what the September data shows, municipality by municipality, and what I think it means if you're buying a new condo, a presale, or selling an older unit that has to compete with all of this.

Source: CMHC Housing Market Information Portal, Starts and Completions Survey, Vancouver CMA (pulled Oct 17, 2026). "Jan to Sept" compares the first nine months of each year. Unsold count is from CMHC's Market Absorption Survey (homeowner and condo units; rentals aren't counted).

Rentals overtook condos

CMHC splits every start by who it's being built for. "Condo" means strata units built to be sold to individual owners. "Rental" means purpose-built rental, owned by one landlord. "Homeowner" is freehold: houses, duplexes and some townhouses.

Total starts are roughly flat: 20,503 in the first nine months of 2024, 20,373 in 2025, 19,789 this year. The mix flipped. Condo starts fell from 11,162 to 7,597, and rental starts rose from 7,251 to 10,230. Rentals are now 52% of everything started in the region.

To put that in context, here's the full-year split going back to 2010. From 2010 to 2012, rentals were under 10% of starts. The share has climbed since, but even in 2022, the best year for rentals' share since at least 1990 (38%), condos still outnumbered them.

Why the swing? CMHC doesn't say in the monthly release, so this part is my read. Condo towers in Vancouver usually need a good share of their units presold before a lender will fund construction. With resale apartment prices falling and investors sitting out (the condo market post has the numbers), those presales are hard to get. A rental building doesn't need presale buyers at all. It needs one owner and construction financing, and federal programs like CMHC's Apartment Construction Loan Program are built for exactly that. So some sites that would have been condos a few years ago are getting built as rentals instead.

September itself was a better month for condos: 1,237 condo starts versus 783 a year earlier. One month of multi-family starts can swing on a single tower, so I'd treat that as noise until it repeats. Looking at it by quarter, the third quarter had 2,885 condo starts against 4,248 in the same quarter of 2025.

A record number of finished, unsold homes

CMHC calls these "completed and unabsorbed" units: construction is done, and nobody has bought them. The count was 2,833 in September 2024 and 6,291 this September. Before 2026, the highest month on record was December 1995, at 5,462.

Apartments are most of it: 4,588 finished condo units with no buyer, up from 2,850 a year ago. Townhouses ("row" in CMHC's terms) went from 764 to 833. Detached houses are the one category that's actually lower, 359 versus 415.

The other number worth knowing is how much of each month's completions sold by the time they were finished. In September, 34.9% of completed homeowner and condo units were already sold (33.9% for apartments). In September 2025 that figure was 75.3%.

Source: CMHC Housing Market Information Portal, Market Absorption Survey, Vancouver CMA. "Sold at completion" = share of that month's completed homeowner and condo units already absorbed.

For scale: the 4,588 finished, unsold new condo apartments are roughly as many as all the resale condos listed in Vancouver, Burnaby and Surrey combined on EstateBlock today (4,512). My read on why that matters: Developers carrying finished, unsold inventory are paying interest, strata fees and property tax on it every month, and they have every reason to move it.

Where the cranes are: starts by municipality

Three cities, Burnaby, Vancouver, Surrey, account for 69% of all starts in the region this year. Burnaby is the standout: 5,658 starts through September, more than double the 2,691 in the same months of 2025. The City of Vancouver is down from 5,196 to 4,542, and Surrey from 4,282 to 3,366.

Source: CMHC Housing Market Information Portal, Starts and Completions Survey, Vancouver CMA (pulled Oct 17, 2026), starts by census subdivision, monthly tables summed January to September. Municipalities with at least 300 starts in either year.

The rental shift isn't the same everywhere. In the City of Vancouver 75% of this year's starts are rentals, and on the North Shore (both the City and District of North Vancouver) it's almost all rental. Surrey and Coquitlam are still mostly building units for sale (condo and freehold). If you follow presale launches, that's where most of the new strata supply will come from once these buildings finish.

Some of the big percentage drops (Port Coquitlam, New Westminster, the City of Langley) come from small numbers, where a single building started or not changes the whole year. I wouldn't read a trend into any single municipality's year from this table. The regional numbers are more reliable.

What's still under construction

Starts tell you about supply a few years out. The units under construction tell you what's landing sooner. At the end of September there were 61,680 homes under construction in the Vancouver area, 54,174 of them apartments (rental and condo). That's 2.3% fewer than a year earlier (63,102), as more units finished than started over the past 12 months.

Completions this year are running at 18,139 for the first nine months, below 2025's 21,164. My read: the record unsold count isn't coming from an unusual flood of new buildings this year. It's coming from slower sales of what's finishing. That's a demand problem more than a supply one, at least for condos.

Nationally, CMHC's six-month trend was essentially flat in September at 250,411 units, and Vancouver's six-month trend rose 6% from August, driven by higher multi-unit starts. CMHC's deputy chief economist, Aled ab Iorwerth, said in the release that a key risk for Canada now is not building enough during this period of softening housing markets across the country. I agree with that for rentals. For condos, the market is telling builders to slow down, and they are.

New condos vs. resale condos

Here's the side of this that hits regular sellers. Every finished, unsold condo is a listing your resale unit competes with, usually with a builder who can offer incentives you can't. The table below puts this year's condo starts next to the resale condos for sale right now on EstateBlock, city by city.

Sources: EstateBlock.com active listings, snapshot October 17, 2026 (asking prices of active listings, not sales); condo starts from CMHC Housing Market Information Portal, Starts and Completions Survey, Vancouver CMA (pulled Oct 17, 2026). North Vancouver combines the City and District.

Burnaby is the one to watch. It has 1,091 resale condos listed with a median asking price of $687K, a median of 55 days on the market, and 2,180 new condo units started this year that will finish over the next few years. The City of Vancouver has twice the resale listings (2,298) but far fewer condo starts (528), because most of what's being built there is rental.

These are asking prices on active listings, not sale prices. For what condos are actually selling for, see the monthly market update or the Burnaby market post.

My read

None of this is a forecast. Starts numbers move a lot month to month, and one big project can change a city's total. CMHC publishes October's numbers on November 17, and I'll update this post then.