SELLING
Selling a house with tenants in it
Yes, you can. You do not need the unit empty to list it, and you do not need your tenant’s permission to sell.
What you do need is to get three things right: how showings happen, whether the tenancy ends at all, and when the clock on that can legally start. Sellers get caught out on the third one more than the other two combined, because the timing is the opposite of what most people assume.
Everything below is BC’s Residential Tenancy Act as the Residential Tenancy Branch publishes it, checked against the Residential Tenancy Branch on 5 September 2026. Rules here changed in 2024 and could change again, so confirm the current position with the RTB before you act on any of it.
The tenancy goes with the house
This is the part to understand first, because it drives everything else.
Selling the property does not end a tenancy. The tenancy is attached to the unit, not to you. When title transfers, the buyer becomes the landlord on the same agreement, at the same rent, with the same deposit. The buyer inherits the obligation to return that deposit, but the money does not move on its own — deal with the transfer of deposits in the contract of sale, or the buyer ends up owing a deposit they were never handed.
So the default outcome of your sale is that your tenant stays. Ending the tenancy is a separate thing that has to be triggered deliberately, by the buyer, and only in specific circumstances.
Showings: 24 hours, in writing, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Showing the place to prospective buyers is explicitly a reasonable purpose for entering. But you have to do it properly.
Written notice, given at least 24 hours and not more than 30 days before entry. The notice has to state the date, the time — which must fall between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. — and the reason.
Three things sellers regularly get wrong:
The notice covers your agent too. Notice is required for an authorized third party entering on your behalf, which means me. It is not enough that you told the tenant you were selling.
Verbal agreement works, but only if the tenant offers it. If the tenant is home and says come in, that is fine. They are under no obligation to agree without written notice, and a tenant who feels ambushed stops agreeing very quickly.
The tenant does not have to leave. They have the right to be present, or to have someone there for them, while a stranger walks through their home. You cannot require them to go out for a showing.
Common areas — a shared hallway, a courtyard — need no notice.
What I actually do
I stop relying on the minimum. The Act gives you 24 hours’ notice as a floor; a working relationship gives you a house that shows well every time.
On a tenanted listing I worked in Kelowna there were two separate tenancies in the building. We set fixed showing days, 24 hours’ notice, each tenant confirmed by text before anything was approved, and all of it went into the agent remarks so a co-operating agent found out when they searched rather than when they arrived.
That is a restriction, and it costs you. A house that can be seen three days a week takes longer to sell than one that can be seen any time. You either accept the longer timeline or you price for the smaller pool who can work with it. What you cannot do is pretend the restriction is free.
Ending the tenancy for the buyer: the three month notice
If your buyer wants the place empty, there is one route, and it is narrow.
Under section 49 of the Act, you can end the tenancy when all of these are true:
- You have an agreement to sell.
- All conditions of the sale have been satisfied.
- The purchaser asks you in writing to end the tenancy.
- The purchaser, or a close family member of theirs, intends to occupy the unit.
- The building is not one this route is closed off in. You cannot use it at all where the unit sits in a building of five or more rental units that is not strata titled, or that is strata titled with every unit owned by the same owner. If you own a fourplex-and-up that was never stratified, this door is shut, and no amount of good faith opens it.
“Close family member” is defined narrowly: the purchaser’s spouse, or the parents or children of the purchaser or their spouse. Not a sibling, not a cousin, not a friend. And the RTB’s generated notice has no option for a corporate purchaser — if your buyer is a company, get advice before you promise anybody vacant possession.
The notice period is three months, and the tenant gets 21 days to dispute it. Both of those changed on 21 August 2024 — before that it was four months and 30 days — so any guidance you find online written before then is wrong on the numbers.
The tenant is owed compensation equal to one month’s rent, and you pay it — not the buyer who asked for the notice — before the effective date. Sellers assume this lands on the purchaser. It does not, unless you negotiate that into the contract.
The buyer, or their close family member, then has to actually live there for at least 12 months. That obligation is real and it is enforceable. It is not a formality to sign past.
You cannot generate the notice yourself any more
Since 18 July 2024, if a purchaser asks you to end a tenancy for their occupancy, the notice must be generated through the Residential Tenancy Branch’s web portal. It is form RTB-32P, and a properly generated one carries a unique Notice ID in the top left corner.
A notice you typed yourself, or downloaded from somewhere, is not valid. The purchaser’s written request has to be served with the notice, not just held on file. Have the birthdates ready before you start — yours, the purchaser’s, and the person actually moving in — because the portal asks for all of them.
The timing trap
Here is the sequence people get backwards, and it is the single most expensive misunderstanding in a tenanted sale.
The three month clock cannot start until the sale is unconditional. Not at listing. Not at accepted offer. Not while your buyer is still working on financing. Subjects have to be removed first, then the purchaser makes the written request, then the notice is served, then three months run.
And three months is a floor, not the date. The effective date has to land on the last day of a rental period — so a notice served on 12 April does not end the tenancy in mid-July, it ends it on 31 July. Add another three to five days if the notice is mailed or left rather than handed over, because the Act deems it received later than the day you sent it.
So a buyer who removes subjects on 1 March is not getting vacant possession in April. They are looking at the end of June at the earliest, and later if the tenant disputes.
If your buyer needs to move in on a specific date, that date has to be built backwards from this sequence before anybody signs anything. I have seen more tenanted deals strained by a completion date that ignored the notice period than by anything a tenant did.
Which buyer is your buyer?
Renters split your buyer pool in two, and the halves want opposite things.
An investor reads a tenanted property as a running business. Existing rent, existing tenants, income from day one, no vacancy to fill. For them the tenancy is the point, and a good long-term tenant is an asset you should be marketing.
An owner-occupier reads the same listing as a problem to solve. They need it empty, and they are doing arithmetic about three months and one month’s compensation before they write.
You cannot fully satisfy both, and a listing that tries reads as vague to everyone. Decide early which buyer this house is really for, and be straight in the marketing about what the next owner inherits.
Before you list
Find your paperwork. Fixed term or month to month, the actual rent, the deposit amount and when it was collected, and any agreements you have made informally. “I’ll have to check” reads as risk to a buyer’s agent.
A fixed term matters. You generally cannot end a fixed-term tenancy early for a purchaser’s use. If your tenant is under one, know when it ends.
Tell your tenant before they see a sign. Not as a courtesy — as strategy. A tenant who hears it from you first cooperates. A tenant who finds out from a lockbox does not, and there is very little you can do about it after that.
Get advice on your specific situation. The Residential Tenancy Branch is the authority and their information line is free. On anything contested, talk to a lawyer. I can tell you what a tenancy does to your price, your timeline and your buyer pool. I am not the person to tell you whether a particular notice is valid.
Selling with tenants, on a real file · How I approach a listing
General information about residential tenancies in British Columbia, current as of September 2026, not legal advice. The Residential Tenancy Act and its regulations are set by the Province and the Residential Tenancy Branch is the authority on how they apply; your own tenancy agreement and circumstances govern your situation. Braden Koop Personal Real Estate Corporation operates under RE/MAX Kelowna. Each RE/MAX office is independently owned and operated.
