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Mortgages Built for Smart Real Estate Investing.

Investor Questions We Actually Get Asked

How much down payment does a rental property actually take?

For a pure rental, plan on 20% minimum. Default insurance is not available on investment properties, so the insured 5% and 10% tiers you may remember from buying your own home do not apply here.

The exception worth knowing: if you live in the property yourself and rent out part of it, a suited house or a duplex with you in one side, it is still your principal residence in the lender’s eyes. That can put insured financing back on the table with far less down, and the suite income helps you qualify. For a first investment, house hacking a suited property is often the cheapest door into the game, and it is exactly the kind of structure we map before you shop.

How much of my rental income will lenders actually count?

Here is the industry’s open secret: it depends less on your property than on which lender reads your file. Some lenders use an offset method that puts most of the rent to work in your favour. Others add a percentage to income, which helps far less. A few haircut it so aggressively that a profitable property somehow hurts your application.

Same portfolio, same leases, same you, and the maximum mortgage can swing by six figures depending on the lender’s rental math. This is the single biggest reason investor files belong with a broker: we know whose calculator likes your portfolio before we submit anywhere. Bring your leases and your property tax bills, and we will show you the spread.

My bank was great for the first two properties. Why did they stall on number three?

You hit a cap you were never told about. Most lenders limit how many rental properties, or how much total exposure to one borrower, they will hold. Reach the ceiling and the answer becomes no regardless of how strong the file is. The frustrating part is that the decline says nothing about you and everything about their portfolio policy.

Growing investors need a sequencing plan: which lenders to use early, which to save for later doors, and when a credit union or specialty lender enters the rotation. Files at this stage also stop being standard, and the fixes are structural rather than rate-based. Here’s what complex actually means in a BC mortgage file, and why the broker choice starts mattering more with every door.

Should I buy my rentals inside a company?

Ask your accountant first, and let us tell you the financing half honestly: holding companies usually make the mortgage harder, not easier.

Fewer lenders finance corporately owned residential rentals, pricing is often a notch worse, and nearly every lender demands your personal guarantee anyway, so the liability shield people imagine is thinner than advertised. If your accountant has a genuine tax reason for a corporate structure, we will find the lenders who work with it. But incorporating purely because it sounds more professional typically costs money on both the accounting side and the mortgage side. Structure should follow the tax plan, never the other way around.

Does BC’s speculation and vacancy tax apply to my rental?

If the property sits in a taxable area, the rules apply to you, but a properly rented property is generally exempt: the long-term tenancy exemption typically requires the home to be rented at least six months of the year, in stretches of a month or longer. Nightly rentals do not satisfy it, which is the trap for anyone running a vacation property as a business.

Two housekeeping points that catch investors: everyone owning in a taxable area must declare by March 31, even the fully exempt, and missing the declaration means being assessed automatically at the maximum rate. And the rates doubled for 2026, to 1% of assessed value for BC residents, citizens, and permanent residents, and 3% for foreign owners. Check each address against the province’s list and keep your accountant in the loop.

Can I use short-term rental income to qualify?

Mostly no, and it is better to plan around that than argue with it. Most lenders discount nightly rental income heavily or exclude it entirely, and the few who count it want a documented operating history, meaning tax returns, not a listing platform’s revenue projection.

The rules layer is also unstable: BC’s short-term rental framework plus each municipality’s bylaws have shifted more than once in two years, and what is permitted at one address may be prohibited a block away. Our standing advice is to qualify the purchase on long-term rental math or your own income, and treat any nightly rental revenue as upside if the address, the bylaw, and your patience all cooperate.

What’s the exit plan? What happens when I eventually sell?

The tax side first, stated plainly: unlike your own home, selling a rental triggers capital gains tax, and the rules around it have been a moving target in recent years. That math belongs with your accountant well before a listing, not at filing time.

The mortgage side is ours, and it is where planning years ahead pays. Which properties carry which mortgages, when each term matures, and what the penalties look like in a sale year should be designed, not discovered. Selling a property mid-term with the wrong mortgage structure can hand five figures back to a lender unnecessarily.

If you want to see the whole arc thought through, from the first leveraged door to the sale that clears the debt on everything you keep, we wrote the complete playbook here, built from a real 25 year BC file.