Mirroring global trends, a growing share of Canadians is renting, with renters increasing at twice the rate of homeowners over the last decade. This is especially true in large cities and among recent immigrants. While immigrant homeownership previously exceeded that of native-born Canadians for decades, recent years have seen a steady decline. Today, the National Housing Strategy identifies recent immigrants as a "priority group," a population at disproportionate risk for housing vulnerability.

Despite immigrant renting becoming increasingly significant—and by some accounts problematic—we know relatively little about it. Qualitative studies document the many barriers immigrants face in accessing rental housing, and Census data provide insight into changing settlement patterns. Still, the evidence landscape on immigrant renting (and renting more generally) is patchy at best.

Rental markets present unique research challenges. Agreements are typically person-to-person, turnover is high, and only purpose-built rentals are tracked consistently. This makes it difficult to understand rental housing activity, especially for subpopulations like immigrants. While recent studies leverage technological advances to analyze rental markets via online listings, they focus on dominant-language platforms such as Craigslist in the US, Flatmates in Australia, and 58.com in China. In diverse cities with substantial immigrant communities, this narrow focus is problematic. Not only does such an approach likely miss significant market activity, but it also fails to capture the rental behaviors and likely outcomes of immigrants who, as international migration research suggests, often search for housing within their linguistic and cultural communities This is particularly concerning given the documented rise in housing precarity among recent immigrants and the growing anti-immigrant sentiment linking immigration to growing unaffordability. Better understanding immigrant renting is thus critically important, both to identify sources of housing insecurity and to counter xenophobic narratives that single out immigrants as scapegoats for broader policy failures.