As of January 1, BC increased the Speculation and Vacancy Tax again.
Most people reading this already know that, especially anyone actually paying it.
Foreign owners and satellite families are now at 3%.
Non-BC income earners at 1%.
Residents still at 0.5%.
None of that is surprising. What is worth paying attention to is what the policy continues to reward and what it makes increasingly uncomfortable.
Holding land and doing nothing costs more every year.
Turning land into housing supply remains exempt.
That incentive gap keeps widening.
The Rental Math That Stopped Working
At the same time, the rental side of the market keeps confirming something developers have known for a while.
Rents across Metro Vancouver are down roughly 8% year over year and close to 14% over three years. Vacancy is sitting around 3.7%, the highest level in decades.
But build-to-rent multiplex in the GVRD never worked to begin with. You can’t finance them. You can’t underwrite them conservatively. Most serious players stopped trying.
What has changed over time is that the build-to-rent math continues to move the wrong way for anyone still hoping rent growth will eventually bail out marginal projects.
Build-to-rent assumptions keep getting worse.
Build-to-sell still works—if you’re selective.
That distinction matters more now than ever.
The 100,000 Lot Illusion
Over a hundred thousand lots across Metro Vancouver are zoned for multiplex. Everyone knows that. What’s less obvious until you’re deep in the numbers is how quickly that pool collapses once you apply real constraints:
- Frontage
- Massing
- DCL and DCC fees
- Utility servicing
- Construction costs
- Exit pricing
- Time
Most sites don’t pencil.
Some barely pencil.
A small number produce outsized returns.
That’s not a policy debate. That’s an everyday underwriting reality.
Headlines vs. Structure
Right now, a lot of private capital is reacting to headlines instead of structure.
Rates. Days on market. Tariffs. Cost to build. Elections. Sentiment.
None of that tells you whether a specific property can absorb risk and still produce safe return on equity.
That’s the problem PlexRank was built to solve.
Not to predict the market.
Not to chase volume.
But to identify the narrow set of properties where the numbers are strong enough from the start—even with conservative timelines, even with normal execution risk.
When you begin with site-level precision, compressed cycles, and a defined exit, you’re not relying on optimism or the news. You’re working inside known constraints.
The Real Bottleneck
The bottleneck today isn’t zoning.
It isn’t demand.
It isn’t even construction.
It’s coordination.
Getting the right sites, the right capital, and the right execution aligned at the same moment is still the hard part. That’s where deals stall—not because multiplex doesn’t work, but because alignment doesn’t.
That’s where my focus is this year: clean math, better partners, and turning zoning into finished buildings instead of conversations.
David Babakaiff Co-Founder, VanPlex
Weekly notes on multiplex, capital, and what actually moves in Vancouver.
