I went into this research expecting to confirm a thesis. I came out with a more complicated picture — which is how good research is supposed to work.
For six months starting in August 2025, I tracked the Kamloops rental market systematically: CMHC's annual and quarterly reports, BC Assessment data, every active rental listing I could find on Rentals.ca and Facebook Marketplace, BCREA's monthly statistics releases, and Zolo's price history tool for the specific neighborhoods I was underwriting. I also talked to two property managers and sat in on a Thompson-Nicola landlord association meeting.
Here's what I learned — including the thing I was completely wrong about.
The Data Sources and What Each One Actually Tells You
Starting with sources matters because each dataset measures something slightly different, and conflating them produces bad conclusions.
CMHC's Rental Market Report is the most rigorous vacancy data available for Kamloops. It's based on an annual survey of purpose-built rental buildings (not condos rented by individual landlords), conducted each October. The 2025 report put Kamloops's vacancy rate at 1.4% — the second consecutive year below 2%. A vacancy rate under 3% is generally the threshold at which landlords have pricing power. At 1.4%, the market is functionally as tight as it gets without being technically zero.
The limitation: CMHC's survey excludes secondary rentals — basement suites, single-family homes rented by individual owners, and condominium units rented privately. In a city like Kamloops, where the secondary rental market is substantial, this means the CMHC number understates total supply while also missing demand in that segment.
Rentals.ca's National Rent Report covers both primary and secondary markets, aggregated from listing data. For Kamloops, the October 2025 snapshot showed average asking rents for a one-bedroom at $1,520/month and a two-bedroom at $1,890/month — increases of 6.2% and 7.4% year-over-year respectively. Inflation in the same period was 2.9%. Rents in Kamloops are growing at roughly 2–2.5x the rate of general inflation. That's a meaningful signal.
The limitation of Rentals.ca data: it's asking rents, not signed rents. In a tight market these can drift apart — particularly where landlords are testing the ceiling. The actual signed rent may be 3–5% lower than the listing.
BC Assessment is where I spent the most time. The annual assessment rolls are publicly accessible and, if you're willing to spend the hours, give you property-level data on assessed values across the city. I cross-referenced assessed values against sold prices (available through BCREA and individual listing history on Zolo) to calculate price-to-assessment ratios by neighborhood. This is a rough proxy for market activity — properties trading well above assessed value suggest competitive demand; properties trading near or below suggest softness.
In 2025, properties in Brocklehurst and Sahali were generally trading 8–14% above assessed value. Westsyde was more mixed, and the Aberdeen plateau saw a wider variance. None of this is actionable on its own, but it told me where the market was pricing in demand and where uncertainty remained.
BCREA's monthly statistics gave me the transactional volume and median price trend data. Kamloops saw median detached prices stabilize through Q3 2025 after the correction of 2022–2023. Sales volume recovered modestly — up 11% year-over-year in Q4 2025 — but remained below the 2021 peak. This is actually the environment I want to enter: prices that have corrected from their froth, transaction volume recovering, rental demand structural.
What the Data Actually Says About Demand
The story across all sources is consistent: Kamloops has a supply-constrained rental market with demand anchors that are not cyclically sensitive.
Thompson Rivers University enrollment stands at approximately 26,000 students (including distance learners), with on-campus and Kamloops-area enrollment around 10,000–12,000. Interior Health Authority (formerly Northern Health in this region) employs several thousand people across the Royal Inland Hospital and associated facilities. These two institutions create a permanent base of rental demand that doesn't disappear when mortgage rates shift.
The neighborhoods with the highest observed rental demand in my research:
North Shore / Brocklehurst: Dense, established, close to downtown via the bridges. Older housing stock but strong tenant demand — multiple applications per vacancy is the norm based on what I heard from property managers.
Sahali: Higher-income rental demographic, proximity to Royal Inland, and a stable turnover pattern. Vacancy here is almost nonexistent in purpose-built buildings.
University District and TRU surrounds: Predictable seasonal demand with the academic calendar, but year-round stability from graduate students and staff.
What the Data Doesn't Tell You
This is the part I find most valuable — being explicit about the gaps.
The condition of the rental stock. CMHC's vacancy rate tells me how many units are available. It tells me nothing about whether those units are habitable, well-maintained, or in compliance with BC's residential tenancy standards. In an aging secondary rental market, a meaningful portion of supply may technically be available but practically substandard. This matters for underwriting because it creates an opportunity (renovated units command premium rents in a tight market) and a risk (the true competitive supply for a well-maintained unit is smaller than the headline number).
Landlord-tenant dynamics under the Residential Tenancy Act. BC's tenancy legislation is among the most tenant-protective in Canada. Rent increases for existing tenants are capped at the annual allowable increase (2.9% for 2025). Eviction grounds are narrowly defined. These aren't arguments against investing — they're constraints you have to underwrite correctly. A property with long-tenured tenants at below-market rents isn't worth what a vacancy-reset rent roll would suggest.
The informal secondary market. A non-trivial share of Kamloops rental activity happens through Facebook Marketplace and word of mouth — never listed on Rentals.ca or any aggregator. This makes total supply estimation genuinely difficult. My sense from conversations with landlords is that this segment is also tight, but I don't have clean data to back it.
The Thing I Was Wrong About
I went into this research expecting the numbers to tell a clean story about which neighborhoods would produce the best cash flow. What I found instead is that the neighborhood-level data in Kamloops isn't granular enough to draw those conclusions from public sources alone.
I assumed Westsyde would underperform on rental demand relative to the central neighborhoods. The CMHC data doesn't break out vacancy by neighborhood for a city of Kamloops's size. When I talked to one property manager who works specifically in the Westsyde and Rayleigh corridor, her vacancy rate was under 1% and her average tenancy length was over four years. My assumption was wrong.
The lesson: aggregate data tells you about the market. Ground-level conversations tell you about the neighborhood. You need both, and the latter is harder to get but more valuable.
What I'd Do Differently
If I were starting this research over:
I'd talk to property managers before I read the reports. The data gives you a frame. The people operating in the market give you the texture that makes the data interpretable. I did this late in the process when I should have done it first.
I'd track a cohort of listings over time rather than looking at snapshots. I started monitoring specific listings in October 2025 — noting how long they stayed active, what the final posted rent was, and when they disappeared. By February I had three months of data showing average time-to-fill across neighborhoods. That longitudinal view is more useful than any single-point snapshot.
I'd look harder at the property management cost structure earlier. I spent most of my time on revenue (rents) and relatively little time on the operational cost structure — vacancy loss, maintenance reserves, property management fees (typically 8–10% of gross rent in Kamloops). The cash flow math is only as good as the expense assumptions, and my initial expense estimates were optimistic.
Where This Leaves Me
The research confirms the broad thesis: Kamloops has a structurally tight rental market, demand anchors that aren't interest-rate sensitive, and a price environment that's reset from the 2021 peak without reversing the underlying demand story.
It complicates the thesis in useful ways: the Residential Tenancy Act is a real constraint on upside, the condition of individual properties matters more than neighborhood-level averages, and the best opportunities I've found require conversations that no data platform surfaces.
I'm continuing to track specific sub-markets and I'm at the point where the next phase is walking properties, not reading reports. The research phase has a point of diminishing returns, and I think I've hit it.