The short answer: six free sources cover most of what you need to research Kamloops real estate. AIR's monthly releases for prices, sales and listings; CMHC's Rental Market Survey for vacancy and rents; BC Assessment for assessed values and land-versus-building splits; Zolo for listing and price-cut history; Rentals.ca for asking rents; and the City of Kamloops for permits and zoning. Each one has a blind spot, and the useful skill is knowing which.
What are rents doing? Are prices rising or falling? Is the rental market tight? These are answerable questions if you know where to look, but the data for BC Interior real estate is scattered and, in places, misleading. Here's what each source is good for, where it falls short, and a simple way to track all of it.
Corrected 6 October 2026. The first version of this post pointed to BCREA for Kamloops statistics and to the Kamloops and District Real Estate Association (KADREA), which amalgamated into the Association of Interior REALTORS® (AIR) in 2022; AIR is the source now. It quoted CMHC's 2024 vacancy rate (1.4%) when the 2025 figure (1.2%) was already out, said properties were selling 18–25% above assessment without a source, and gave a City of Kamloops open-data address that doesn't exist. Those are fixed below.
1. BC Assessment
URL: bcassessment.ca
What it's useful for:
BC Assessment's public-facing lookup lets you search any BC address and see the property's current assessed value, the split between land and improvement value, and the year-over-year change. That last piece is underrated. Tracking how a specific neighbourhood's assessment values have moved over three to five years gives you a rough proxy for where the municipality thinks long-term value sits.
The land vs improvement split is particularly useful for investors thinking about highest and best use. A property where land value is 65% of the total assessment ($370,000 of a $569,000 total) tells you the market is pricing in land potential — it's a location play, not just a cash flow play. A property where improvements are 60% of the value tells you a different story: the building itself is driving value, which typically means the neighbourhood has less redevelopment upside.
You can also pull property class codes, which tells you how the property is classified for assessment purposes (residential, multi-family, commercial). This matters if you're looking at a property with a commercial ground floor — the tax treatment and financing options differ.
What it's not useful for:
Current market value. The BC Interior real estate 101 post covers this, but it bears repeating: BC Assessment values are set as of July 1 of the prior year, mass-produced through statistical modelling, and are explicitly designed for tax fairness across a jurisdiction, not for appraisal accuracy at the individual property level. When the market has moved since the valuation date, sale prices and assessments can sit well apart, in either direction. Do not use the assessment as a negotiating reference point without also understanding that gap.
2. AIR Monthly Market Stats
URL: interiorrealtors.ca/market-statistics
What it's useful for:
The Association of Interior REALTORS® (AIR) publishes a monthly release for Kamloops and District, usually in the first week of the month. (The old Kamloops board, KADREA, amalgamated into AIR in 2022, so older articles that cite KADREA are pointing at what is now AIR.) The releases give you benchmark prices by property type (single-family, townhome, condo), sales, new and active listings, and year-over-year comparisons. The benchmark is the MLS® Home Price Index value for a home with typical attributes, which tracks the market more reliably than a median sale price. The BC Real Estate Association (BCREA) rolls the boards' figures up into provincial stats.
Looking at six to twelve months of AIR data for Kamloops lets you identify whether you're in an accelerating or decelerating market, which is useful context when you're deciding how aggressively to bid or how much contingency to build in.
What the limitations are:
The figures cover Kamloops and District, not just the city, so sales in smaller surrounding communities are in the mix. Trends in those smaller markets can dilute or distort the Kamloops-specific signal. If condo prices in Kamloops proper are rising but a large batch of rural sales pulled the benchmark down, the headline number is misleading for your specific investment thesis.
Also, AIR doesn't publish rental market data. Their stats are entirely transaction-based — buy and sell. For rental market intelligence, you need different sources.
3. Zolo
URL: zolo.ca
What it's useful for:
Zolo has the best listing history interface of any public-facing real estate search tool in BC. You can see every time a property has been listed, what the listing price was, and how many days it sat before selling or being withdrawn. That price reduction history is genuinely useful — a property that listed at $599,000, dropped to $579,000 after 30 days, dropped again to $559,000 after 60 days, and then sold, tells you something real about seller motivation, market reception, and potentially negotiating room on similar properties.
Use it to build a picture of how long properties are sitting in specific neighbourhoods and how often asking prices get cut.
What's not reliable:
Sold data. A third-party site isn't the MLS® system itself, so sold prices can be missing, delayed or incomplete. Don't build an underwrite on them. Treat them as directional, and confirm any comparable you rely on through a realtor with MLS® access.
4. Rentals.ca
URL: rentals.ca
What it's useful for:
Rentals.ca is the most comprehensive aggregator of rental listings in Kamloops. You can filter by property type, bedroom count, and neighbourhood, and see what landlords are currently asking for comparable units. This is useful for checking the rent assumption in an underwrite. Before you assume a rent for a unit, look at what comparable units in the same and adjacent neighbourhoods are listed at, and note the spread, not just the middle.
What the limitations are:
Rentals.ca doesn't capture private landlord listings — the significant portion of the rental market where a landlord texts their network, posts on Facebook Marketplace, or just puts a sign on the lawn. In Kamloops especially, where many older properties are owned by long-time locals who've never used a listing platform, a meaningful share of the rental market is invisible here. The actual market rent ceiling may be higher than what Rentals.ca shows if private demand is absorbing units before they hit the platform.
Rentals.ca is also asking rent, not actual leased rent. What landlords ask and what they sign leases for can differ, particularly in slower periods. In fall and winter, once TRU's semesters have started, watch for listings with incentives such as a free first month, which don't show up in the headline rent.
5. CMHC Rental Market Survey
URL: cmhc-schl.gc.ca (Rental Market Report data tables)
What it's useful for:
This is the most credible primary source for rental market fundamentals in Kamloops. CMHC conducts annual Rental Market Surveys and publishes data on vacancy rates, average rents by bedroom count, and the rental universe size (the count of purpose-built rental units tracked in the survey) for major and secondary markets including Kamloops.
CMHC's October 2025 survey put Kamloops's vacancy rate at 1.2% for the primary rental market (purpose-built apartments), after 1.4% in 2024. That's a tight market. For context, a rate around 3% is commonly treated as balanced. At 1.2%, landlords are in a strong position relative to tenants, and rent growth pressure is real. Average rents in October 2025 were $1,347 for a one-bedroom, $1,679 for a two-bedroom and $2,094 for three bedrooms or more.
CMHC also publishes housing starts data by type, which tells you whether new supply is entering the market and in what form. If multifamily starts are accelerating, that's a forward-looking signal about future vacancy rates. If they're low despite tight vacancy, that supports the rent growth thesis.
Best use: quarterly check for vacancy trends and rental universe growth. It's not a tool for deal-level analysis, but it's the only credible source for market-level rental fundamentals in BC's smaller cities.
6. City of Kamloops Property and Permit Information
URL: kamloops.ca (Zoning & Property Information, and Building Permits)
What it's useful for:
The two most useful things the City offers for real estate research are permit history and zoning information.
Permit history shows what work has been done on an address with permits: construction, electrical, plumbing, demolition. What you can see online varies, so for a full history on a property you're serious about, ask the City's building department. As the worked duplex example shows, pulling a permit history before booking a showing can surface deferred capital issues that aren't disclosed in a listing. A property with no permits pulled in 20 years on a 1970s-era building is a red flag. A property where you can see permits for a furnace replacement (2019), a hot water tank (2021), and an electrical panel upgrade (2018) is telling a different story.
The zoning maps are useful for understanding what's permitted on a parcel — can you add a garden suite? Is this lot zoned for duplex or could it be rezoned for small-scale multi-unit? In Kamloops, like many BC municipalities adapting to the provincial small-scale multi-unit housing legislation, there's been zoning evolution worth tracking.
A Simple Tracker You Can Build
The problem with six sources is that you look at a neighbourhood, form a view, and forget the numbers a week later. A spreadsheet with four tabs fixes that:
- Properties: every listing you look at seriously, with address, asking price, unit mix, rents and the date you saw it.
- Rent comparables: rental listings for the unit types you care about, with asking rent, date first seen and date gone.
- Monthly snapshot: one row a month with five numbers: AIR's single-family, townhome and condo benchmarks, CMHC's latest vacancy rate, the asking rent for a two- and three-bedroom in your target areas, and the Bank of Canada's average 5-year fixed rate.
- Permits: the permit history for any property you underwrite.
Five numbers a month doesn't sound like much, but after six months it shows you direction, not just a snapshot. When the benchmark is flat, vacancy is rising and asking rents are softening, the environment has changed, and you want to see that coming before it arrives.
Common Questions
Where can I find Kamloops real estate statistics?
The Association of Interior REALTORS® (AIR) publishes a monthly release for Kamloops and District with benchmark prices, sales and listings, usually in the first week of the month. CMHC's Rental Market Survey covers rents and vacancy each October.
Is Zolo accurate for sold prices?
Use it for listing history and price cuts, not for sold comparables. It isn't the MLS® system, so sold data can be missing or delayed. Confirm any comparable you rely on through a realtor with MLS® access.
Is BC Assessment value the same as market value?
No. It's a mass appraisal valued as of 1 July of the previous year, built for fair taxation rather than for pricing an individual property. Sale prices can sit well above or below it.
None of these tools give you certainty. They give you better-calibrated uncertainty, which is the actual goal.
Sources: AIR — market statistics · CMHC — Rental Market Survey data tables · KelownaNow — Interior realtors form mega association (AIR, KADREA and KAR amalgamation) · Bank of Canada — interest rates for new lending by chartered banks
Written by Jagatjeet, as part of a public BC Interior real estate learning journey. Published 9 May 2026. Updated 7 October 2026. Jagatjeet is working toward a BC real estate licence and is not a licensed realtor. Nothing here is financial, legal or tax advice.