Rentals.ca and Urbanation released August’s numbers on September 9. The average residential asking rent in Canada was $2,035, down 4.8 percent from a year earlier, the twenty-third straight month of annual decline, the lowest August reading since 2022, and 7 percent below two years ago. Purpose-built apartments held up best at $2,038 (down 3.3 percent); condos fell 7.7 percent and houses and townhomes 8.3 percent. The report names its headwinds: record apartment completions still in the pipeline, a declining population, and a trade war that Urbanation president Shaun Hildebrand expects to hit demand “through lower employment and consumer confidence” and supply “through potentially higher construction costs.”
Storage owners read housing news for the ownership side: sales, moves, the missing mover I wrote about this summer. The rental side deserves the same attention; renters are the customer with the least space.
Two different rents
The word “rent” does two jobs in this piece. Residential rent is what Rentals.ca measures: the asking price on a vacant apartment, usually a twelve-month lease rolling to month to month. In British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec the increase a landlord can put to a sitting tenant is capped or guided (2.3 percent in BC for 2026, 2.1 percent in Ontario for buildings first occupied before November 2018, 3.1 percent recommended in Quebec), so landlords reprice at turnover and bury discounts in free months rather than cutting the face rent. Storage rent is a month-to-month agreement outside every province’s residential tenancy law. No rule caps the increase an operator puts to an existing customer, most reprice within the first year, and the web rate on a vacant unit can change weekly. From here on, “asking rent” means apartments, “street rate” the storage move-in price and “in-place rate” what an existing storage customer pays. The two markets share a customer, not a rulebook; falling apartment rents reach storage through demand and the marginal shopper, not mechanically.
Why apartment rents are falling, and why it continues
CMHC’s Spring 2026 Housing Supply Report put 2025 housing starts at 259,000, up 6 percent, with rental apartments doing the lifting: record rental starts in Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa, Halifax and Montreal, and rental construction at nearly twice the ten-year average nationally. Completions set records in Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton last year and are tracking higher in 2026. The Fall 2026 Housing Supply Report, released September 10, adds that purpose-built rental is now two thirds of apartment starts in the key markets: a record 86 percent in Montreal, about 60 percent in Vancouver and Calgary, and an 82 percent jump in Toronto rental starts in the first half. CMHC’s summer outlook has total starts sliding from about 241,000 this year to 212,000 by 2028, and the Fall report says construction “is expected to slow faster than demand.” For the next 18 to 30 months, what is in the ground keeps arriving.
Demand is weaker than supply. Canada’s population fell for three straight quarters through April 1, 2026, and the non-permanent resident count dropped about 590,000 between October 2024 and April 2026. August’s Labour Force Survey shed 42,000 jobs, with unemployment at 6.4 percent and youth unemployment at 12.9 percent. Urbanation counts 64 percent of GTHA purpose-built projects offering incentives, typically one to two months free, worth $377 a month against a $2,864 face rent; stabilized GTHA vacancy is 6.8 percent, vacancy including buildings in lease-up is 12.4 percent, and 31,645 rental units are under construction, the most in decades.
If the trend continues, apartment asking rents drift down another 3 to 5 percent over the next twelve months in the delivery-heavy markets. If it accelerates, with export-sector job losses landing on a shrinking renter pool at the completion peak, declines widen and incentives become the norm. Urbanation said in July that GTHA apartment rents had “likely found their floor”; two months later its national report says the seasonal tailwind has faded. Both can be true: Montreal and Toronto show the mildest declines of the six, and the pressure has moved west.
Three ways this reaches the storage rate card
The first is substitution at the margin. Nationally, a one-bedroom asks $1,753 and a two-bedroom $2,146, a spread of $393 a month. JBW’s weekly street-rate survey, which has tracked published web rates at 226 facilities in 36 markets since mid-June, puts a standard 10×10 at $208 a month in the month to September 10 ($239 climate-controlled); across all 10×10 listings the panel averages $271 in Toronto, $278 in Ottawa, $246 in Calgary, $237 in Edmonton and $206 in Montreal, and JBW’s September 13 census of Metro Vancouver’s 131 facilities puts Vancouver at $352. For a household weighing a one-bedroom plus a storage unit against a two-bedroom with two months free, the arithmetic favours the bedroom. In Edmonton a 10×10 lists at nearly 16 percent of the average apartment rent, the highest ratio of the big markets, against just over 10 percent in Toronto and Montreal. This is a marginal effect; most customers rent storage because something happened to them. But street rates are set at the margin, by the customer the operator must win this week.
The second is shared demand. The forces softening apartment rents are the forces that fill or empty a storage lease-up. Purpose-built deliveries mostly reshuffle the existing renter pool: CMHC’s turnover data shows new high-end supply drawing higher-income renters and freeing cheaper units. Every link in that chain is a move, and moving remains the most common reason anyone rents storage, so the delivery wave generates move-ins even as apartment rents fall. What the wave does not generate is net new households, which lift storage occupancy and pricing power together.
The third is pricing behaviour. The apartment landlord, unable to reprice sitting tenants, protects the face rent and gives on net effective rent. The storage operator protects the list rate the same way and gives at the front door: a promotion to win the move-in, then increases on the in-place rate. Between June and September, list rates at the 170 facilities priced in both months did not move: the median change was zero and 45 percent of unit prices were unchanged. Promotions did the work. In every week since mid-June, 35 to 48 percent of priced listings carried a promotional rate, the typical offer deepened from a third off in June to half off by September, and the average first-month price across the panel fell 7.5 percent while list prices stood still. The national platforms discount 78 percent of their listings, independents 18 percent, and two large chains none at all. An apartment market with 12 percent lease-up vacancy and free-rent incentives is about to produce more moves, and every move is a customer leaving an in-place rate for a promotional one.
The Canadian evidence so far
Public disclosure already shows the split. StorageVault reported same-store revenue growth of 3.9 percent in Q2 2026, its forty-fifth consecutive positive quarter, across a largely stabilized portfolio of 272 locations. SmartStop’s 13 stabilized GTA stores reported same-store revenue down 1 percent in the same quarter in constant currency, with occupancy at 92.2 percent, down 60 basis points. Management cited tough comparisons and tariff hesitation, and said GTA storage supply has peaked. JBW’s survey adds the seasonal read: listed units showing sold out rose from under 2 percent in June to about 5 percent through July and August; the summer filled units, at a discount. Discounting is heaviest on the Prairies (Lethbridge, Regina, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Brandon and Calgary all had 60 percent or more of listings on promotion) and lightest in Quebec City and Gatineau, which had almost none: broadly the west-to-east gradient of the rent report. Vancouver, priciest of the six, discounts almost as heavily: 56 percent of the census’s published rates carry a promotion, the median offer is half off, and three in ten of the metro’s facilities publish no per-size price at all.
That is the shape of the next twelve months: stabilized storage portfolios keep growing revenue on the in-place roll while street rates, the number every lease-up and acquisition pro forma depends on, go sideways or down.
The twelve-month read by market
| Market | Apartment asking rent, Aug 2026 (year over year) | Housing starts, H1 2026, per 10,000 residents | JBW survey, Aug 10 to Sept 10: 10×10 list rate, first-month price, share of listings on promotion | JBW twelve-month storage street-rate read |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Calgary | $1,825 (-4.5%) | 61 | $246 list $160 first month 62% on promotion |
Soft. Rental starts fell more than 30 percent in H1 2026, but the record 2024 and 2025 starts are still completing and apartment vacancy already sits at the 5 percent CMHC calls balanced for Alberta. |
| Edmonton | $1,520 (-4.1%) | 51 | $237 list $124 first month 77% on promotion |
Soft to flat. Cheapest apartment rents and the heaviest storage discounting of the six; list rates are the highest share of apartment rent among the big markets. |
| Vancouver | $2,704 (-4.1%) | 41 | $352 list $251 first month 56% on promotionSept 13 census |
Soft. Record completions, BC population down 0.9 percent in the year to April, apartment vacancy at its highest since 1988; suburban storage lease-ups already running 36 to 42 months. |
| Ottawa | $2,168 (-1.6%) | 37 | $278 list $214 first month 30% on promotion |
Flat. Rental apartments are 64 percent of completions and CMHC says the supply gap is still widening; lightest storage discounting of the six. |
| Montreal | $1,955 (-1.1%) | 30 | $206 list $174 first month 36% on promotion |
Flat to firm. Most resilient apartment rents of the six; one-bedrooms up 1.2 percent. |
| Toronto | $2,570 (-1.4%) | 19 | $271 list $180 first month 42% on promotion |
Flat. Fewest starts per capita, but 31,645 GTHA rental units still to deliver, and storage supply only now past its peak. |
Sources: Rentals.ca and Urbanation National Rent Report (Sept 9, 2026); CMHC Fall 2026 Housing Supply Report (Sept 10, 2026); CMHC Rental Market Report (Dec 2025); Urbanation GTHA Q2 2026; SmartStop Q2 2026 call; JBW Canadian Self-Storage Rate Survey (published web rates, 226 facilities in 36 markets, June 13 to Sept 10, 2026; five to seven facilities per market shown); JBW Metro Vancouver census survey (Sept 13, 2026; 131 facilities, 76 with published standard-unit rates). Storage read is JBW’s opinion.
What to do with it
For acquisitions, underwrite storage street rates flat to down 3 percent in Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver for 2027 and flat elsewhere, and let revenue growth come from the in-place rate program and length of stay, not the rate card. Split the storage rent roll into in-place and move-in rates in diligence; the gap is the risk. For lease-ups, budget promotions as a standing line, not a launch cost, and stretch absorption. For sellers, the November REIT calls and the next two Rentals.ca prints will set the buyer’s narrative on rate growth; a trailing twelve built on street-rate increases invites a retrade.
If apartment rents stabilize, as Urbanation expected in July, none of this costs an owner more than conservatism. If they keep falling, the owner who priced the roll off last year’s storage street rates finds out in the lease-up schedule first and the cap rate second. The survey runs weekly; the thing to watch this fall is whether half-off promotions outlive the moving season, because a promotion that survives the off-season is a price cut.
Patrick Wood, JBW Commercial. Questions on the survey data or the market calls: pat@jbwcommercial.com.