Apartments for Rent in Vancouver

Rent figures published for Canada come on a mesh of survey zones. Those zones were drawn for a housing survey and not for a municipality, so a figure from one of them cannot be read as the rent of a City area. Nothing on this page borrows from that mesh.

The City of Vancouver publishes its local areas as open data, a division made to deliver services across a large territory. Its last revision is not dated in the metadata, so no revision date is stated here.

The map on a listing shows a five-hundred-meter circle around the home, never an exact point: Quoloc does not publish the address, and only the person advertising can choose to give it in the exchange. A Street View tab shows the street where coverage exists. A home is counted where its address falls, which is what lets a count survive a change in the names around it.

Metro Vancouver extends well past the municipality, and part of what people call the city is governed elsewhere: the University Endowment Lands belong to no municipality at all, and Burnaby, where Simon Fraser University sits, is a city of its own. A listing outside Vancouver is counted in the municipality it is actually in.

Renting a whole home in Vancouver answers to British Columbia. Residential Tenancy Branch (the British Columbia office that administers residential tenancies and hears disputes) publishes what applies, at gov.bc.ca/landlordtenant. The agreement itself goes through the standard agreement the province publishes as the Residential Tenancy Agreement.

Leaving before the end of an agreement raises the same two terms as anywhere in the province: assignment and sublet, the two ways a tenancy can pass to someone else. The policy guideline the Branch publishes on assignment and sublet sets out each of them, and reading it before signing costs less than reading it afterwards.

Every listing carries a public comment thread. A reply cannot itself receive a reply: the thread stays one level deep. A thread under a listing is public, and it stays attached to that listing rather than to whoever wrote in it.

The list of apartments for rent filters on price, move-in date, minimum stay, furnished or not, smoking, pets and the type of property; with Quoloc Plus, also on the twenty-three amenities, the number of rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms, the floor, the elevator, parking and who is letting. Moving the map narrows the list to what is in view.

An apartment listing carries the rent and its currency, whether utilities are included, the floor area, the number of rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms, the floor, the elevator, parking, whether the apartment is furnished, the dates it is available, the minimum stay and who is letting it (the owner, an agency or a tenant moving out). Twenty-three amenities are ticked, from wifi to a garden, and the listing says whether pets and smoking are accepted. All of that can be read before writing. What a rent covers is stated rather than implied, because two homes at the same figure are not the same offer when one includes heating and the other does not.

Exchanges happen in the site's messaging. You can write from the moment you register, without the other person having to allow anything: a published listing and a published profile are both contactable. Messages stay grouped and the history remains available.

Online since 2015, Quoloc covers 31 cities across 12 countries. A figure here is a count of listings, never an estimate of a market.

One and the same detector runs over listings, messages, comments and profiles. It recognizes an email address, a phone number, a social media handle and a web address, including ones written to fool a machine: an address broken up with "(at)" and "(dot)" is caught, and so is a number spaced out digit by digit. The exchange therefore stays where reporting and blocking exist.