For all the headlines focused on foreign buyers, pre-sale condo flips, and Airbnb investors, there’s another force quietly shaping Canada's rental market: foreign students. Not investors. Not developers. Not speculators. Just students—millions of them, quietly paying sky-high rents, propping up cash flow for overleveraged landlords, and silently holding up one of the most fragile legs of Canada’s housing system.
Let’s start with the hard numbers. As of December 2023, Canada had over 1.02 million international students, according to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). That’s more than double the number just a decade ago. In British Columbia, the number crossed 292,000, while Ontario’s count was just shy of 500,000. These students don’t live in dorms. They live in private rentals, basement suites, investor-owned condos, and sometimes unsafe, illegal housing arrangements. In other words—they are deeply embedded in the urban rental fabric.
Their presence is not minor. A 2022 CMHC report revealed that international students accounted for as much as 27% of renters in cities like Burnaby, Scarborough, Brampton, and Surrey. A 2024 update by Urbanation pegged that share at up to 30% in downtown Toronto and 25% in Vancouver’s West End and Mount Pleasant. In student-heavy zones like North York, entire condo towers are practically student housing under a different name.
But their influence isn’t just about unit occupancy. It’s about pressure. Demand. Competition. With each new intake of international students, thousands of new renters are added to a system already strained by decades of underbuilding. Students are desperate. They sign leases immediately. They pay cash. And many of them share small units with multiple roommates, pushing landlords to charge more than they could from a typical Canadian tenant.
This behavior drives up rents for everyone.
In Vancouver, the average rent for a one-bedroom unit hit $2,891/month in March 2025—up 38% from pre-pandemic levels. In Toronto, that number is $2,797/month, according to Rentals.ca. In student-dense neighborhoods like Waterloo, Kingston, and Halifax, rents have increased between 21% and 34% since 2022.
All of this creates a dangerous dependency. Students are the rental market’s silent fuel, and investors rely on them to justify increasingly unhinged mortgage carrying costs. Without them, the entire cash flow model begins to crumble.
Why? Because students don’t just rent—they overpay. They often rent sight unseen, from overseas, in groups. Many lease one-bedroom condos and squeeze in 2–3 tenants. Others rent windowless dens or living rooms for $1,000/month each. Entire single-family homes in Burnaby, Mississauga, and Surrey are now de facto rooming houses—hosting six, seven, even eight students, each paying $900–$1,400/month.
The math is obvious. A landlord who owns a $1.4M bungalow with a $5,800 monthly mortgage can’t rent to a single family. But six international students paying $1,000 each? That’s $6,000/month—enough to cover mortgage, property tax, and some profit.
This model has become so pervasive that landlords actively advertise to students. Walk around university districts, and you'll see "student-friendly" listings offering high-rent, low-privacy units. The model works because investors aren’t chasing equity—they’re chasing yield. And international students are the yield.
Meanwhile, most Canadian students or young workers can’t compete. They’re not backed by international bank accounts. They don’t offer 12 months of prepaid rent. And they sure as hell aren’t going to share a two-bedroom apartment with five strangers. This has created a dangerous dual market: one for student-renters who prop up investor returns, and one for locals, who are increasingly shut out.
Even developers know this. Pre-sale condo towers near universities are often marketed in Asia and South America, not locally. Developers know that parents of foreign students will buy units in cash, just to house their child and “invest” in Canadian real estate. These purchases aren’t for resale—they’re wealth parking strategies. But they also remove supply from the open rental market, creating further scarcity.
In this way, international students are not just renters—they are part of a broader financial architecture that sustains inflated housing values. Remove them, and the pillars of that architecture weaken.
Let’s play out the hypothetical: foreign student visas are paused, enrollment quotas slashed, or students stop coming. What happens?
Immediately, rental demand collapses. If just 30% of international students (roughly 300,000) left the rental market, it would return up to 100,000 units to urban supply almost overnight. That would be the largest one-year rental vacancy increase in Canadian history.
In downtown Toronto, Richmond, and Surrey, vacancy rates could jump from 1.1% to 5% or more. Rent drops of 10–20% would follow in under 12 months. Not because of a correction—but because the market would be flooded with units that investors can no longer fill.
Then comes the domino effect. Investors—especially those with variable-rate mortgages—would begin offloading units. Already, 30% of Vancouver condos are cash flow negative as of 2025. Without high-paying students, that figure could climb to 50%, especially in pre-sale heavy zones like Brentwood, Lougheed, and City Centre.
Developers would panic. Hundreds of new projects are currently underwritten with rent projections based on continued student growth. Strip out that demand, and future towers no longer pencil. Expect project cancellations, construction halts, and a wave of suburban investor distress sales.
Bank exposure would follow. A CMHC audit from late 2024 revealed that over $36 billion in rental mortgages are held by landlords whose tenants are predominantly international students. These are not homeowners—they’re speculators. A drop in rental income would trigger delinquencies, credit downgrades, and possibly a surge in fire sales, sending prices spiraling.
Would this collapse all of Canadian real estate? No. But it would obliterate condo valuations in key urban markets, and force thousands of overleveraged investors into difficult decisions. If even 10–15% of rental investors in Metro Vancouver or the GTA defaulted, it could shave 15–25% off average condo prices over two years.
It’s not a question of if student-driven demand props up the market—it’s by how much. And the answer is: a lot more than anyone admits.
International students didn’t create this mess. They are victims of it.
Brought in under the guise of education, they are exploited for labor, housing, and tuition. Many study in unregulated private colleges operating out of shopping plazas. Others pay $35,000/year in tuition only to graduate with a worthless diploma and $2,500/month rent bills. Their presence benefits only three groups: schools, landlords, and developers.
The rest of society pays the price.
Canadian students can’t find affordable rooms. Working-class renters are outbid by six-person student groups. Housing stock is monopolized by speculative landlords chasing student rent. And the real estate market itself becomes artificially inflated by temporary, vulnerable tenants.
This is not sustainable. It’s a house of cards—one that could fall if immigration policies shift or international student flows slow. As Canada looks to cap student visas and regulate private colleges, we may finally be forced to confront this silent dependency.
The rental market we have is not a result of bad luck—it’s the outcome of intentional design.
If Canada is serious about housing affordability, here’s what must happen:
Tie international student visas to actual housing availability, not just college seat counts.
Regulate and shut down fraudulent private colleges acting as visa mills.
Restrict student-focused investor purchases in key rental zones to prevent further distortions.
Implement a national registry of student-rented units to understand real market absorption.
And most importantly, stop using immigration to mask housing supply failures.
Canada cannot build a sustainable housing system while propping it up with precarious student demand. It’s cruel, short-sighted, and economically dangerous. Housing should be built for residents—not as bait for global tuition revenue and inflated rent yields.