Looking for furnished apartment rentals in Vancouver? Whether for a month or longer term, finding a nice furnished place in this city can be an eyewateringly expensive and difficult endeavour.
We recently went through the painful process of trying to find a nice furnished rental in Vancouver for 6 months, and… yikes. Seriously – YIKES.
While I was born and raised in Vancouver, I have been living abroad for most of my adult life, so returning to conquer the Vancouver rental market for the first time was a truly jarring experience… especially downtown.
The prices! The questionable “dens”! The prices again! It was enough to make a gal want to hide in a Burnaby basement suite forever.
But against all odds, we did end up finding an amazing apartment in our dream location, with actual tasteful furnishings and enough space to swing our arms around without hitting a lamp.
Below we’ll be breaking down the top tips and resources that we found helpful during our hunt for a furnished apartment in Vancouver… alongside which websites were a total waste of time.
We hope this guide to finding a furnished rental in Vancouver is helpful to you!
NOTE: This post is based on our experience finding a short-term furnished rental in downtown Vancouver during January 2022. While we think most of the tips and resources also apply to furnished rentals elsewhere in the Lower Mainland, just be mindful that your experience might be a bit different if you’re hoping to stay in a different area, or for a longer period of time.
General Tips for Finding a Furnished Rental in Vancouver
Before we list out the resources and websites that we used to find our Vancouver furnished rental, we want to start with some general tips that will help you secure your apartment.
Act Quickly
Finding a nice rental in Vancouver is highly competitive. The more desirable the apartment (i.e. the cheaper it is, the better it’s decorated, the nicer the view), the more it becomes like an accommodation Hunger Games.
So, if you’re serious about finding yourself a furnished apartment in Vancouver that isn’t a $4000 monthly shoebox, you need to act quickly. Cast those procrastination tendencies away and approach each listing with the intensity of an overly caffeinated stalker.
When you see a nice apartment pop up, get your message in there right away. Throw in as many emojis as you need. Sell yourself! But most importantly, get in there first.
Most landlords/agencies will work on a first come/first serve basis, so that bit is the most important.
This tip doesn’t just apply to messaging apartments for showings either.
If you happen to do a showing and you like the place, don’t wait around to get your roommate’s mom’s cousin’s opinion, show your interest right away so you can keep the process moving.
We lost out on a few apartments we thought we had in the bag because other people were quicker to send back their paperwork or do a call, so we definitely learned the hard way that speed trumps other factors most of the time.
Have your “spiel” locked and ready to go
Usually listings will ask you to send over a bit of information about yourself, so it’s good to have a pre-written spiel that you can copy and paste as listings show up.
For each person you’re apartment hunting for (e.g. just you, you + your partner, etc.) include important details such as…
- How long you need the rental for
- Your job/source of income
- Whether or not you have pets
- Whether or not you have kids
- Whether or not you smoke
- OPTIONAL: Age
- OPTIONAL: Your availability for a showing
Ultimately, you want to emphasize the parts that would make you a problem-free tenant. For us, we are non-smoking professionals with no pets, and no kids, so we made sure this information preceded the less desirable parts of our application such as the fact that we were abroad at the time.
This little spiel should be short and to the point, with a professional but friendly tone, something like:
“Hi [insert name], my boyfriend (insert age) and I (insert age) are looking for a 6 month rental in downtown Vancouver and your place looks perfect! I currently work as a [insert job], and my boyfriend is a [insert job]. We’re both non-smoking, and we have no kids or pets. Let us know if you will be doing any showings next week, as we’ll be in the area on [insert days and times]. Thanks so much!”
Prepare to pay more than you expected
Rent prices in Vancouver are at an all time high right now, and prices are especially steep for shorter term furnished rentals.
While there are still some good deals to be found, the average furnished rental in Vancouver will cost a lot more than in previous years, and the shock is especially huge if you’re coming from a less expensive city.
While most Vancouverites have (over the years) acclimatized to the absurd prices in this city, it’s fair to say that Vancouver prices are…. traumatizing if you’re not used to them.
So, just prepare yourself and your bank account for that, and factor in additional costs too like the deposit (usually half a month’s rent) and move-in/move-out costs.
Read listings carefully
While it’s tempting to just scroll through the pretty photos and skim through the rental description, it’s really important to read each listing thoroughly to catch key details like minimum rental periods, caveats with the rental price, etc.
Check especially for small print indicating whether or not utilities are included, whether the strata will charge a move in/move out fee, whether you need to pay extra for parking, internet, etc.
These are all costs that you need to factor into your rent. Oftentimes during our search for a furnished place, we noticed some places had super cheap rent compared to others, but the listed price included no utilities so the price ended up being comparable to others in the end.
Conversely, the apartment we’re in now had a price tag that was on the upper end of our budget, but the price was an “all-in” price that included utilities, internet and even Telus Optik TV (with a Crave subscription!) so it ended up being a fairly good deal for the area.
All in all – make sure to read the full listing to get a feel for the actual costs of the apartment, rather than just the listing price.
Learn how to spot scams
Unfortunately, the rental market in Vancouver has a lot of scams. The old adage of “if it’s too good to be true, it probably is” rings all too true here.
And while resources like Facebook Marketplace have made it easier than ever to spot scams, they still are around, so it’s important to develop a good ‘scam radar’ during your apartment hunt.
Some red flags include…
- Rent that is MUCH lower than comparable places
- Overly filtered photos
- Photos that look like renderings (some companies use ‘digital staging’ which involves adding rendered furniture to make the place look nicer)
- Asking for rent or deposit payments upfront without you having ever seen the place
When in doubt, trust your gut. Ideally, you should do at least a video walkthrough of the place before committing, or better yet, if you have the luxury of having family or friends in Vancouver, send someone you trust to do a viewing in your place.
There was one place we really loved based on photos, but once we sent some family to do a viewing, they discovered that the unit looked way different to the photos, with all the premium furniture from the photos switched out for cheaper stuff.
Plus, the camera failed to capture how dirty and old the unit was. We’re still thankful everyday that we sent family to do a viewing for us, because the listing really did make it look like a dream home.
All that to say – make sure you do your due diligence and don’t get scammed!
Research your building thoroughly
This tip is more applicable to those looking for apartment rentals in downtown Vancouver than elsewhere, but besides doing your typical checks of the area/neighbourhood, sometimes it’s helpful to go a step beyond and look into the apartment building itself so you get a feel for “invisible issues” that you won’t see during a viewing.
After all, there are a lot of apartment buildings in downtown Vancouver with high turnover, and that’s often for a reason.
How can you dig up dirt on your prospective building? A quick search of the building name + Reddit can often bring up experiences from people who have lived there. Google reviews is actually a weirdly helpful resource as well, because that’s where many disgruntled people go to air their grievances.
During our apartment hunt, doing this additional research allowed us to veto buildings that supposedly had dreadful elevator wait times, or general noise issues due to crappy windows/thin walls.
Now, if you’re staying for a short amount of time like we are, then it may be alright to overlook certain downsides like bad management, but this is crucial information if you plan to stay longer, so this additional step of research is key!
Be Flexible
Lastly, as is true with rentals anywhere in the world, there’s always tradeoffs when it comes to:
- Price
- Space
- Newness of the unit
- Unit furnishings
- View
- Location
The odds of you finding a place at an affordable price point that is spacious, modern, well furnished, with a nice view, and in a nice location is……. we don’t want to say impossible, so we’ll just say it’s not…. ultra possible.
Unfortunately, compromises will usually have to be made when you’re hunting for a furnished Vancouver rental, so try to be a bit more flexible in your approach and know where you’re willing to make certain concessions.
For us, we were willing to pay a bit extra if that meant nice furnishings and space, since we both work from home.
In the end, we had to sacrifice a nice view to get what we wanted in our price point, which is fine because we now have a fabulous view into all the other condo dwellers in our area, rather than the water. Who needs an ocean view when you can watch people watch Netflix?
Jokes aside, be sure to know where your compromise points are, and where you’re non-negotiable.
Websites and Resources for Finding Furnished Rentals in Vancouver
Alright, now that we’ve covered the basic tips for finding a furnished rental in this great city, let’s move onto specific resources that you might find helpful. These are all the sites we ended up using during our apartment hunt, but if you have any other suggestions then let us know in the comments!
Facebook Marketplace
Hands down, the best resource we found for (furnished) apartment hunting in Vancouver was Facebook Marketplace.
There’s a lot of pros with using Facebook Marketplace, the biggest one being that everything is linked to a Facebook profile, meaning it’s quite easy to suss out whether or not you’re dealing with a scammer. This isn’t foolproof of course, but there’s a certain comfort in dealing with an actual human who shares actual memes vs. a faceless posting on Craigslist.
The reverse is true as well – it makes it easy for landlords and agencies to confirm that you’re a normal non-murderer as well, which can work in your favour if you have a wholesome Facebook profile… (and are, in fact, not a murderer).
The Facebook algorithm also clues in pretty quickly that you’re apartment hunting, so will start showing you similar properties on a fairly regular basis.
In terms of getting actual replies from people, we had the best luck with Facebook Marketplace, even if they were rejections. Maybe that human element makes ghosting more difficult, but yes: keep an eye out on Facebook Marketplace for apartment listings because this is where we got a ton of showings and ultimately how we found our apartment that we now love.
IMPORTANT: For FB Marketplace to work for you, you need to be obsessively stalking and refreshing. Nice places get flooded with inquiries almost immediately, so you need to message really soon after posting to get in with a shot.
Facebook Groups
Besides Facebook Marketplace, there are also several Facebook groups designed for sublets and rentals in Vancouver. These groups are especially handy if you’re looking for roommates.
Oftentimes, these groups will be a platform for people to drop their Facebook Marketplace postings, so it’s good to be part of these groups even if you lurk Marketplace religiously. You never know when the perfect listing will be shared, so having several points of notification can be helpful.
Here are a few of the groups that we joined during our apartment hunt:
- Housing and Sublets in Vancouver (rentals)
- Vancouver Housing, Rooms, Apartments, Sublets
- Vancouver – Rent Apartments Houses Rooms
- Vancouver | Places for Rent
You’ll of course see many duplicate postings across these groups, but when your search is desperate, it’s better to just have more bases covered.
Craigslist
A shockingly good resource for finding furnished apartment rentals in Vancouver is Craigslist.
While it’s the polar opposite of Facebook Marketplace in terms of privacy and anonymity, weirdly we got a lot of responses from nice people on there. Craigslist is actually used by a lot of agencies to find tenants for their clients, so we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s actually legitimate, but something about that bare bones design and basic font makes us feel like we’re one email away from getting our kidneys stolen.
Nonetheless, if you’re looking for a furnished rental in Vancouver, Craigslist is actually a great bet, with a lot of new listings all the time. Of course, lots of people do rely on Craigslist for finding rentals, so acting fast is of utmost importance, just like with Facebook Marketplace. But, so as long as you stalk Craigslist religiously and message quickly, then you’re in with a good shot to at least secure a viewing.
Zumper
Zumper is a great site for apartment hunting in Vancouver. The user interface and search functions are really good, and they make it easy to check availability and communicate with landlords directly.
While ended up finding an apartment via Facebook Marketplace in the end, we did get a good viewing experience through Zumper, so no complaints there. The only downside we would say is that we didn’t get that many replies relative to the inquiries we sent, but again, that’s more a “Vancouver’s rental market is insane” issue, rather than a Zumper issue.
AirBNB
If times are really desperate and your main priority is simply finding yourself a place to stay, then your best (but expensive) option is AirBNB.
There’s a lot of pros to using AirBNB for a furnished rental in Vancouver so long as you don’t mind the (relatively) astronomical price tag: you can see availability and book right then and there, you don’t have to compete with tons of others for the place, and the fees (while high) are all-in, so you don’t need to worry about utilities and additional costs like that.
Based on our search, there’s actually a lot of long term rentals in Vancouver. We theorize this is because a lot of buildings (especially downtown) now have limits on short term rentals, and many require there to be minimum rental periods of at least a month, which is why you’ll find so many monthly-only rentals on AirBNB.
The downsides are of course obvious. Based on our search, it seems renting an apartment monthly on AirBNB will cost you at least 1.5x more than usual, and… well, there are many people who have chosen to boycott AirBNB in recent years due to a variety of factors we won’t go into. Overall, we wouldn’t recommend AirBNB for furnished rentals in Vancouver unless you’re really desperate and just want to throw money at the problem so it’s done.
Rent It Furnished
Because we started our apartment hunt from abroad, Rent It Furnished was a site that we stalked religiously just to look at the potential options.
On the surface – the website looks awesome. There’s lots of listings, clear pricing, and it’s fun to ‘window shop’ all the potential places that you can rent. Because it’s a site built literally for furnished rentals, it helps collate exactly what you’re looking for.
But – it’s important to note that you can’t realistically start looking for apartments on there until 6 weeks before, because that’s the deadline that current tenants have to renew their leases. This means that even apartments that show as being available from a certain date aren’t actually guaranteed, because current tenants have dibs.
The process also wasn’t as quick and seamless as we were hoping, with the same application you have to fill out each time, and pretty lengthy response times.
Ultimately, we were really disappointed with our Rent It Furnished experience. It’s possible this had to do with the fact that our apartment search overlapped with the holiday season, but we sent a lot of inquiries that we never got replies to, and other times we would get replies several days later saying all of the ones we wanted were no longer available, but they had this other one we might have the privilege of possibly getting if we hurried and got in there quick.
The main reason we would have gone with an agency like this was ease, but it seemed like their service didn’t really make anything easier, and in the end, we’re happy we worked directly with a landlord because now we have a direct line of contact in case anything goes wrong, whereas with Rent it Furnished you’ll always be dealing with an agent.
As an additional note for any internationals like us who have we had international phone numbers: their online form frustratingly doesn’t accommodate well to international numbers, which makes it a pain to enter employer/reference information if you’re coming from outside North America.
Make Yourself at Home
Make Yourself at Home is another website where you can find both furnished and unfurnished rentals in Vancouver, whether you need them on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
We liked how easy it was to submit inquiries with them – you can even message about several listings at once, which is really helpful when you’re in a mad scramble to find a place to live.
While the selection here isn’t huge compared to other sites, the agents we spoke to were super quick in responding, and overall we got a great vibe from their team. In the end, none of their available units were a fit, but they’re definitely worth checking out if you’re looking for a place in Vancouver (or Victoria!)
PadMapper
Hands down, the most satisfying part of finding our apartment wasn’t even getting the keys and moving in, it was being able to unsubscribe to freaking PadMapper.
I am not exaggerating when I say that you will receive upwards of 10 emails a day from these people… and the worst part is the emails are (for the most part) useless. Think “hey, still interested in this apartment even though you already submitted a query and the landlord has completely ignored it?” type useless. They like to frequently remind you of the apartments you’ve submitted queries for, which is 50 shades of useless if you ask us, but hey – at least the site is slick!
While PadMapper has a really great design and user experience, we didn’t find it very helpful with getting actual viewings. This could have been an ‘us’ problem (i.e. no landlord wanted us), but we submitted SO many requests, only to receive maybe one or two responses back, a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of emails they sent us.
On the plus side though, they do make it very very easy to submit queries, so you don’t have much to lose if you’re just playing a numbers game… except maybe storage space in your email.
Other Furnished Rental Websites in Vancouver
The resources above were all ones that we dealt with and had first hand experience with, but there are actually a lot more options for furnished rental websites in Vancouver.
While we have no direct experience with these ones, we know how during the apartment hunt, sometimes it’s a sheer numbers game, so here are some other sites to check out. For the most part, they seem like furnished rentals intended more for a corporate type of audience, which means higher price points, but some do look quite nice:
We hope you enjoyed this guide to finding furnished rentals in Vancouver!
Let us know in the comments if you have any additional tips or resources you would add to our list.