Helio · Markets · Rentalas of Oct 1, 2025
The Halifax rental market, in one reference.
Thirty-six years of the CMHC vacancy print, today's asking rents, the supply pipeline behind them, and the demand pushing on all of it — read against Helio's own under-construction portfolio. Not a broker. A record.
As of Oct 1, 2025 · CMHC Rental Market Survey · Zumper · Statistics Canada · IRCC · the Helio Developments Map
Asking rents
CMHC surveys the occupied rental stock every October; Zumper prices what's actually listed today. They are different concepts on the same axis — labeled honestly, not blended.
Average vs. asking rent — 1BR & 2BR
Two different concepts, same axis: CMHC surveys the occupied rental stock every October; Zumper prices what's on the market today.
Vacancy, 1990–present
The thirty-six-year line. This is the single number the whole Halifax housing conversation orbits.
Halifax primary rental vacancy rate, 1990–2025
The CMHC Rental Market Survey, every October, thirty-six years running.
Supply
What's coming, from two vantage points: CMHC's citywide starts/completions/under-construction counts, and Helio's own parcel-level projection from the permits we track.
Supply pipeline — starts, completions & under construction
Starts and completions as trailing 12-month rolling sums (monthly counts are too noisy to read raw); under-construction is the raw monthly stock.
Helio pipeline
Helio supply projection — expected completions
Model estimate, not a forecast of certainty: for each of Helio's 371 tracked under-construction projects, we take the earliest recorded permit-issuance date (or the last known regulatory-state date where no permit date is on file) and add the empirical p50 permit-issued→final-inspection duration for that project's size band, drawn from HRM's own completed-project paper record. This is a paper-record basis — treat every bar as a no-earlier-than estimate, not a delivery date. Methodology: a project whose p50 estimate has already passed is re-projected using its band's p75, then p90, duration before being called "overdue" — the current quarter is never used as a catch-all for late paperwork. 73 project(s) had a past-due p50 estimate and were re-projected against the same band's slower p75/p90 duration before landing in a bar above. 61 project(s) (5,353 units) remain past-due even at the p90 (slowest-10%) duration for comparable projects — shown in the separate "Overdue vs. model" bar, not folded into the current quarter. 71 projects (4,459 units) have no permit or regulatory-state date on file and are excluded. 19 projects have no recorded unit count and are excluded from the unit forecast.
Demand
The pressure side: jobs, migration, and population — the three inputs that turn into rental-market demand with a lag.
Halifax CMA employment
Statistics Canada, Labour Force Survey (monthly, thousands).
Permanent resident admissions
IRCC, monthly admissions to the Halifax CMA, shown as a trailing 12-month rolling sum.
Halifax CMA population
Statistics Canada annual population estimate.
Halifax university enrolment
MPHEC PSIS open data — Dalhousie + Saint Mary's + Mount Saint Vincent, combined, by academic year.
Absorption & strain
How the rental universe has grown against how vacancy has moved, the two public REIT operators' most recent disclosed occupancy, and a strain index Helio is building from first-party listing data.
| Survey year | Rental universe | Universe YoY | Vacancy | Vacancy Δ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 46,097 | +0.8% | 2.6% | -0.8 pp |
| 2017 | 47,848 | +3.8% | 2.3% | -0.3 pp |
| 2018 | 49,609 | +3.7% | 1.6% | -0.7 pp |
| 2019 | 51,387 | +3.6% | 1.0% | -0.6 pp |
| 2020 | 52,913 | +3.0% | 1.9% | +0.9 pp |
| 2021 | 54,054 | +2.2% | 1.0% | -0.9 pp |
| 2022 | 55,451 | +2.6% | 1.0% | +0.0 pp |
| 2023 | 56,437 | +1.8% | 1.0% | +0.0 pp |
| 2024 | 61,055 | +8.2% | 2.1% | +1.1 pp |
| 2025 | 63,898 | +4.7% | 2.6% | +0.5 pp |
Killam Apartment REIT — Halifax portfolio
From Killam's Q1 2026 investor disclosure (public quarterly reporting).
CAPREIT — Nova Scotia portfolio
CAPREIT's own public quarterly investor disclosure, period ending Mar 31, 2026 (public quarterly reporting).
Listing strain index · collecting since Jul 2026
Helio is building a listing-level strain index from monthly building-level snapshots across Halifax landlord direct sites (Templeton Properties, Westwood Group) — asking-price persistence, repricing frequency, and concession presence, cross-referenced against the CMHC vacancy print. 19 buildings tracked so far. It needs at least two monthly snapshots per building before a month-over-month read is defensible; this panel switches to the real index automatically once that threshold is crossed.
These are the numbers. We compute what they mean for a specific parcel.
Work with us →Helio Urban Development is a computation-driven real estate development company in Halifax that reads this record against its own development pipeline.
SOURCES & METHODOLOGY · Vacancy rate, average rent by bedroom count, rental universe, starts, completions and units under construction: Source: Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). Reproduced and distributed on an "as is" basis with the permission of CMHC. · Employment, unemployment, population and building-permit series: Statistics Canada, adapted under the Statistics Canada Open Licence. · Permanent resident admissions: Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, adapted under the Open Government Licence – Canada. · Median asking rents: Zumper, cited as a published aggregate (Zumper Halifax Rent Report), not independently verified by Helio. · REIT occupancy and rent figures: each operator's own public quarterly investor disclosure, as cited on the card. · University enrolment: Maritime Provinces Higher Education Commission (MPHEC) Postsecondary Student Information System open data, under the MPHEC Open Data Licence — Dalhousie, Saint Mary's and Mount Saint Vincent, combined. · Listing strain index: Helio's own monthly snapshot of publicly posted asking prices, bedroom counts and concessions from landlord direct sites (Templeton Properties, Westwood Group), facts only, no availability inferred. · Under-construction unit count, pipeline count and the completions projection: the Helio Developments Map, Helio's own parcel-level tracking of HRM planning-case and permit records; the projection is a model estimate built from HRM's own paper record of completed projects, not a guarantee. Updated automatically each business day.