Vancouver Permits: Detached Down 65%, Homes Up 8%

Vancouver issued 93 permits for detached houses between January and July this year. In the same seven months of 2022 it issued 264. That is the collapse people mean when they say housing construction in Canada is falling apart. Then look at the bottom line of the same page: the City permitted 5,400 new homes this year against 5,017 in 2022. More homes, in different shapes.

I kept reading about plummeting housing starts, so I went and got the City of Vancouver’s own monthly Statement of Building Permits Issued for July 2026 and July 2022 and put the two side by side. Every number below is from those two documents, from the City’s open permit data, or from CMHC. Here is what they say.

The City renamed the lines, so read the table carefully

One thing to get out of the way first. The July 2022 statement calls the categories “One Family Dwellings”, “One Family with Secondary Suite” and “Two Family Dwellings”. The July 2026 statement calls them “Single Detached House”, “Single Det House with Sec Suite”, “Duplex” and “Duplex with 1 or 2 Suite”. Same buildings, new labels, and one extra line for duplexes with suites that did not exist in 2022.

So the honest comparison groups the detached lines together and the duplex lines together. Both columns below are the “total to date” figures, meaning January 1 to July 31 of each year.

Source: City of Vancouver, Statement of Building Permits Issued, July 2022 and July 2026. “Homes” is the City’s dwelling units column.

Fewer permits, more homes. That is the whole story in one line. The City signed off on 433 fewer residential permits this year and 383 more homes, because the buildings behind each permit hold more people than they used to.

The low-rise drop is real, and it is not small

Detached, laneway and duplex permits together went from 653 to 338 in those seven months. That is a 48.2% drop. Counted as homes rather than permits, 934 down to 535, a 42.7% drop.

The detached number is the steepest. Straight detached houses went from 87 permits to 42. Detached houses with a secondary suite, which was the standard Vancouver build for a decade, went from 177 to 51. If you build single-family homes in this city for a living, that is your market shrinking by two thirds in four years.

Laneway houses are down 47.4%, from 285 to 150. That one surprised me more than the detached number. Laneways were the easy yes: no rezoning, no strata, no neighbour fight. They are still legal and still popular, and they are still being issued at half the 2022 rate.

My read on why is arithmetic. A laneway house costs most of what a small multiplex unit costs to build, and it returns a rental suite instead of a saleable home. When your land is worth $2 million, the extra floor area you put on it has to earn its keep. For years a laneway was the only extra floor area on offer. Today there are better options on the same lot.

Duplexes did not collapse, and nobody mentions that

Here is the number that does not fit the story anyone is telling. Duplex permits went from 104 to 95. That is a drop of 8.7%, which for a four-year gap in a market this rough is basically flat. The homes inside them went the other way, from 208 to 241, up 15.9%, because the 2026 count includes 20 permits for duplexes with one or two suites holding 77 homes between them.

So the “duplexes are dead” version of this story is wrong. A duplex on a standard Vancouver lot still works. It is smaller, simpler and cheaper to finance than a six-unit multiplex, it does not need a strata of six owners to agree on anything, and two units sell to ordinary families rather than to investors.

What actually died is the detached house with a suite. That is the product that lost.

Multiplex went from zero to 576 permits

The July 2022 statement has no multiplex line at all, because the zoning did not exist. Council approved the R1-1 Residential Inclusive zone on September 14, 2023 and it was enacted on October 17, 2023. The first applications were accepted that November.

Vancouver’s first multiplex building permit was issued on June 4, 2024. Since then the City has issued 576 of them, counted from the City’s open permit data through August 26, 2026.

Source: City of Vancouver open data, issued building permits, records whose project description names a multiplex. Data refreshed August 30, 2026.

Note the last two rows. Multiplex issuance is down 10.6% year over year. The line is not going up any more, it is flattening near 150 permits per half year. Anyone telling you multiplex volume is still climbing has not looked since 2025.

Where they are getting built is its own story. In the first seven months of 2026 the leaders were Hastings-Sunrise with 30, Kensington-Cedar Cottage with 23, and Kerrisdale with 17. East side volume, west side value. You can see all of them on our multiplex permit map.

Rental is now the majority of what gets built

The City’s permit statement does not record who a home is built for, so this part comes from CMHC’s Starts and Completions Survey for the Vancouver census metropolitan area, January to July of each year.

Source: CMHC Starts and Completions Survey, Vancouver CMA, starts by intended market.

Rental crossed half of all starts this year for the first time in this series. It went from 5,020 units in 2022 to 7,347 in 2026, up 46.4%, while condo and homeowner starts both fell.

Condo starts went the opposite way. 12,701 in the first seven months of 2023, 5,454 in the same months of 2026. That is down 57.1% from the peak and down 17.3% from 2022. Presales stopped clearing, investors stopped buying, and the projects that depended on both stopped starting.

Total starts held up better than the headlines suggest: 13,686 in 2022 and 14,331 in 2026, up 4.7%. They are well below the 20,420 of 2023, and that gap is the condominium and almost nothing else.

What this means if you own a lot in Vancouver

Four things, in the order they matter.

The buyer for your teardown lot changed. Four years ago the person paying the most for a 33 by 122 lot was building one house with a suite and a laneway. That buyer has mostly left: 264 detached permits down to 93. The person bidding now is pricing three to six units on it. Their number comes from what those units sell or rent for, minus construction, fees and finance. If your lot does not support that math, the bid is lower than your neighbour’s was in 2022, and no listing strategy fixes it.

Rental is where the capacity went. Half of everything being started in this region is now purpose-built rental. That is also true at the multiplex scale, where R1-1 allows up to eight secured rental units on a single lot against six strata units. If you are weighing the two, the build-to-rent versus sell proforma walks the same lot both ways.

Multiplex is no longer a rising tide. 170 permits in the first seven months of 2025, 152 in the first seven months of 2026. Volume is flat. The projects getting issued now are the ones where the land cost, the build cost and the sale price actually line up. Check your lot’s numbers before you assume yours is one of them.

Do not read a category drop as a market drop. Detached is down 64.8% and the total home count is up 7.6%. Both are true, from the same page of the same document. Vancouver is permitting more homes than it did in 2022 and almost none of them are the kind it used to build.

That is the direction. Fewer detached houses, fewer laneways, roughly the same number of duplexes, and a multiplex line that went from nothing to a steady 150 permits every six months. Vancouver is still building. Go and check what your own lot supports, because the answer changed and the old answer is worth less than it was.

Run your address through PlexRank to see how many units your lot supports under R1-1 and what the return math looks like at today’s costs. It takes about two minutes.

David Babakaiff, PlexRank™ | Profit with Multiplex