Your Trusted Kelowna Mortgage Broker. Expert Financing Across the Central Okanagan.

Kelowna Mortgage Questions We Actually Get Asked

Kelowna opted out of the short-term rental rules. Can I count Airbnb income to qualify now?

Be careful here, because the change is narrower than the headlines suggest — and the mortgage answer is different from the zoning answer.

Effective June 1, 2026, Kelowna became the first and only municipality in British Columbia to opt out of the province’s principal residence requirement for short-term rentals. But that only applies to properties rezoned into the City’s new STR sub-zone. Everywhere else in Kelowna, the old rule still stands. So the first question on any property isn’t whether Kelowna opted out — it’s whether that specific address is on the approved list. Verify it with the City of Kelowna before you write an offer, not after.

The mortgage side is more conservative than people expect. Most lenders treat short-term rental income cautiously or won’t count it at all, and those that do generally want a documented history rather than a projection. A pro forma from a listing agent is not income.

And there’s a lesson worth taking from recent history. When the provincial rules took effect in May 2024, Kelowna’s short-term rental inventory fell from roughly 2,400 units to about 400. People who had qualified on that income didn’t stop owing the mortgage. A bylaw can remove your revenue; it can’t remove your payment. We’ll happily structure around short-term rental potential — we won’t build your qualifying on it.

I’m buying acreage outside Kelowna. Does that change the mortgage?

Considerably, and it catches people out on properties in Joe Rich, Ellison, and the rural edges of the Central Okanagan.

Most lenders will only finance against the house and a limited amount of land — commonly the first five acres — with the balance treated as having little or no lending value. So a ten-acre property can appraise well and still support a much smaller mortgage than the purchase price suggests. Add well and septic, which usually mean water potability and flow tests, and an outbuilding or two that may not count toward value at all, and the gap between price and financeable value can be significant. Agricultural Land Reserve status narrows the lender list further.

None of this makes acreage hard to finance. It makes it a file where the lender has to be chosen before the offer, not after.

My income is seasonal. Can I still get a mortgage in Kelowna?

Yes, and it’s common enough here that it’s a normal file rather than an exception — hospitality, tourism, wineries, construction, and the trades all run seasonally in the Okanagan.

What lenders want is a pattern rather than a paycheque. Generally that means a two-year history in the same line of work, with income averaged across the full year rather than taken from a peak month. If you’re paid through a corporation, or your T4 understates what the business actually earns, the picture changes again — see our guide to self-employed mortgages in BC.

The mistake we see is people applying during their strong months and being surprised the lender doesn’t annualize it. Bring us the whole year.

Should I be worried about a strata’s depreciation report?

You should read it, and most buyers don’t.

A depreciation report sets out what the building will need and when, and whether the contingency fund can pay for it. If it can’t, the shortfall arrives as a special assessment — and a special assessment lands on you whether or not you knew it was coming. Lenders and insurers both look at strata documents on higher-ratio files, and a building with a large, unfunded, near-term item can affect approval as well as your budget.

Kelowna has a lot of strata stock built in the 2000s now arriving at the age where envelope and mechanical work comes due. Read the report and the last two years of minutes. If they concern you, that’s information worth having before the subject removal date rather than after.

Is buying a second home or recreational property different?

Yes, in ways that are easy to plan for and expensive to discover late. Down payment requirements are generally higher on second homes than on a principal residence, and higher again on properties that are seasonal, off-grid, on leased land, or without year-round road access. Lender appetite varies more on this category than almost any other, and the differences are structural rather than a matter of rate.

The building I’m buying in has Airbnbs. Does that affect my financing?

Often, yes — and this is the part that surprises people, because it isn’t about you or your file at all.

Lenders assess the building, not just the borrower. Where a strata has a high concentration of short-term rental units, a lender may decline the property outright regardless of how strong the application is. The concern is resale liquidity and the stability of the strata’s finances, not whether you personally intend to rent it out.

What makes this genuinely difficult to predict is that published lender guidelines don’t settle it. We have taken a resort-area strata file to a lender whose broker guidelines explicitly state they finance short-term rental properties, and been declined once their underwriter looked at the building itself. Policy documents describe what a lender will consider. They don’t tell you what a specific underwriter will do with a specific address.

The practical consequence is that a resort or STR-heavy strata needs the lender identified before the offer, not after — and needs a broker who has actually placed one, rather than one reading the same guideline you could read yourself.

Where Else We Work

Central Okanagan buyers rarely search one city. Plenty of files start in Kelowna and end in West Kelowna or Penticton once the numbers get real, and we see the reverse just as often — families moving up from the Lower Mainland for the space. The financing questions follow the property type, not the postal code.