Selling a Tenanted Home in B.C.: The Rules for You — and for Your Tenant

The first question: who is your buyer?

Every rule in a tenanted sale hangs off one fork in the road, and it is not a decision you make — it is a fact about your buyer. Either the buyer is keeping the unit as a rental, or the buyer (or a close family member of theirs) is moving in. The Residential Tenancy Act treats those two situations completely differently, and most of the confusion I see comes from mixing up which set of rules applies. What does not change the rules is the kind of home you are selling: a Burquitlam condo, a Burke Mountain townhome, a half-duplex or a detached house with a rented basement suite all run on the same sections of the same Act.

Worth stating plainly before the fork: you have the legal right to sell a tenanted property at any time. You do not need your tenant’s permission, and you do not need the tenancy to end first. What you cannot do is end the tenancy because you want to sell — the decision to list is not, by itself, grounds to end a tenancy in B.C. The eviction trigger, if there is one, belongs to the buyer’s genuine intention to occupy.

Path one: the buyer is an investor

If the buyer intends to keep the unit rented, almost nothing changes for the tenant. The tenancy does not end because the property sold — the buyer simply becomes the new landlord and must respect the existing tenancy agreement and every right under the RTA. The rent stays where it is, and can only be increased once in any 12-month period within the province’s annual cap — 2.3% for 2026 — with three months’ notice on the prescribed form. The security deposit and any pet damage deposit remain the tenant’s money and follow the tenancy: your lawyer or notary transfers responsibility for returning them to the buyer at completion, usually as a credit on the closing statement. Do not refund the deposit to the tenant on closing day — it moves with the tenancy, not with you.

One thing investor-buyers price carefully: after years under sub-3% rent caps, a long-term tenant’s rent is often well below what the unit would re-rent at today — and a new owner cannot reset it. If your unit fits that profile, the buyer pool and the pricing conversation change, and that is a strategy discussion worth having before the sign goes up, not after the first soft offer.

Path two: the buyer is moving in

If the buyer — or a close family member of the buyer, which the Act defines as the buyer’s spouse, or the parents or children of the buyer or their spouse — genuinely intends to live in the unit, the tenancy can be ended. But the sequence is strict, and it runs in only one order:

• First, the sale goes firm. All conditions of the purchase agreement must be satisfied — subjects removed — and the buyer must ask you in writing to end the tenancy for their occupancy.
• Then, the notice. You serve the RTB’s Notice to End Tenancy — Purchaser’s Use of Property (RTB-32P), and it must be generated through the Residential Tenancy Branch’s web portal. The Province is explicit: a notice on anything other than a generated form is legally unenforceable. No handwritten notices, no letters, no templates from the internet.
• The tenant gets at least three months. The notice’s effective date — the day the tenancy actually ends — must be at least three months after the tenant receives it, and the tenant can dispute the notice through the RTB within 21 days of receiving it.
• The tenant is owed one month’s rent as compensation, paid on or before the effective date — or the tenant can simply not pay the last month.
• The tenant can also leave earlier. On a month-to-month tenancy, a tenant who has received the notice can end the tenancy sooner with 10 days’ written notice — useful to know when you are trying to line up completion dates.

And then the part that outlives the sale: the person named on the notice must move in within a reasonable period and live in the unit for at least 12 months. If the buyer does not move in, moves out early, or rents the unit to someone else during that time — without a legitimate exception — the tenant can apply to the RTB for dispute resolution and pursue compensation of up to 12 months’ rent. That is not a theoretical risk; it is the enforcement mechanism the whole system rests on, and it is why an experienced agent papers the buyer’s occupancy intention properly inside the contract rather than taking it on a handshake.

One more constraint that surprises people: a fixed-term lease is a wall. A purchaser-use notice cannot take effect earlier than the end date of a fixed-term tenancy. If your tenant has nine months left on a one-year lease, no buyer’s moving plans change that. The realistic options are to wait out the term, sell to a buyer who will keep the tenancy, or negotiate a mutual agreement to end the tenancy with the tenant — on the RTB’s form, and usually for more than the statutory one month.

Showings: 24 hours, in writing, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m.

You are allowed to show a tenanted home to prospective buyers. You are not allowed to treat it as vacant. For every entry, the tenant must get written notice at least 24 hours ahead stating the date, the time and the purpose, and the entry must fall between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. unless the tenant agrees otherwise. The tenant does not have to be home — and does not have to say yes to entries that meet the rules — but they are entitled to reasonable showings of reasonable duration, and to quiet enjoyment of their home in between.

The Province’s own guidance leads with something better than notice: agreement. A written showing schedule negotiated with the tenant up front — say, two weekday evening windows and a Saturday block — beats a stream of individual 24-hour notices for everyone involved. It is also the difference between a listing that shows well and one where the buyer’s first impression is a visibly unhappy occupant. In a strata building there is an extra layer: access-controlled lobbies, fobs, elevator bookings and visitor parking are logistics you coordinate on top of the RTA notice rules, not instead of them.

If it’s a condo or townhouse: the strata layer

Selling a detached home or a non-strata duplex? Skip ahead — nothing in this section applies to you. Strata sellers get one set of questions nobody else faces: what does the strata have to say about all this? Since November 2022, less than most owners think.

• Rental-restriction bylaws are gone. Bill 44 made strata rental bans and caps unenforceable across B.C. as of November 24, 2022. Your buyer — investor or occupier — does not need the strata’s permission to rent the unit out later. The surviving exceptions are narrow: seniors’ communities with a 55-plus age bylaw, and short-term-rental controls, which stratas can still impose.
• The Form B still matters. Your buyer’s lawyer will read the strata’s disclosure certificate — contingency fund, special levies, depreciation report, bylaws — and tenancy details belong in the disclosure package alongside it: current rent, deposit held, lease term, parking and storage assignments. A tenancy is a material fact. Disclose it completely.
• Move-out logistics are strata business. Elevator bookings, move-out fees and damage deposits for the move itself are set by the building. If the sale ends with your tenant moving out near completion, build the strata’s scheduling rules into the timeline — possession dates have been missed over an elevator.

Why I put a page for the tenant in the same guide

Here is the pattern I see over and over in tenanted sales: the deals that go smoothly are not the ones with the most leverage — they are the ones where the tenant understood the process from day one. A tenant who hears “the condo is being sold” and nothing else fills the silence with worst cases: surprise strangers in the living room, an eviction next month, a lost deposit. None of those things are legal, but the tenant does not know that — and an anxious tenant makes showings harder, timelines slower and disputes likelier.

So the guide below is deliberately two-sided. Your side lists your seven obligations as a seller-landlord. The tenant’s side tells them, in plain language: the sale does not end your tenancy; you will get at least 24 hours’ written notice before anyone walks through; there are exactly two ways this ends — a new landlord on the same terms, or a portal-generated notice with three months and a month’s rent attached; and here is the RTB’s number if you want to check any of it yourself. Handing your tenant that page in week one is the cheapest goodwill you will ever buy in a real estate transaction.

Where to get help

The referee for everything on this page is the province’s Residential Tenancy Branch — its site carries the current rules, the portal that generates the notices, and every form mentioned here, and its information line is 1-800-665-8779. If either side believes the rules have been broken — a defective notice, refused entry, a buyer who never moved in — the formal route is to apply for dispute resolution through the RTB, online or on paper. Both links are on the tenant’s side of the printable guide too, because a tenant who can check the rules for themselves is a tenant who does not have to take anyone’s word for anything.

The short version

• You can sell any time. The tenancy survives the sale; the buyer inherits it.
• Investor buyer: nothing changes for the tenant. Same terms, the deposit follows the tenancy, rent capped at 2.3% for 2026.
• Occupier buyer: RTB-32P only, generated through the RTB portal, after the sale is firm — three months’ notice, one month’s rent, a 21-day dispute window.
• The 12-month rule has teeth. The person named must move in within a reasonable period and stay 12 months, or the tenant can pursue up to 12 months’ rent.
• Fixed-term leases cannot be cut short by a purchaser-use notice. Plan the listing around the lease, not against it.
• Showings: 24 hours’ written notice, 8 a.m.–9 p.m. — and a negotiated schedule beats notices every time.
• The strata cannot block rentals (Bill 44, since November 2022) — but it does control elevators, fees and move-out scheduling.

Common questions