CASE STUDY · KELOWNA
A Kelowna sale with tenants in place
Listed at $924,900, with two separate tenancies in the building and showings restricted to three days a week.
The situation
The house had renters in it. Not one tenancy — two, upstairs and down, with their own schedules, their own jobs and their own reasonable opinion about strangers walking through their kitchen on a Saturday.
That is a completely normal way to own a house in Kelowna and a completely abnormal way to sell one. Every instinct a listing agent has — open houses, easy access, show it on demand — runs directly into the fact that somebody lives there and has rights.
Most of the advice sellers get in this spot is some version of “get them out first.” Sometimes that’s genuinely the answer. Often it isn’t, because ending a tenancy properly takes months, and because a house with a paying tenant is worth more to a certain kind of buyer than an empty one.
What we actually did
Agreed the showing window up front and then respected it. Showings ran on three set days a week, with 24 hours’ notice, confirmed with each tenant by text before anything was approved. That went into the agent remarks and into the booking system, so a co-operating agent found out about it when they searched, not when they showed up.
Treated the tenants as part of the team, not as an obstacle. They were told what was happening and when. In return the house showed well every single time, which is not a small thing when you have limited chances.
Let the schedule shape the pricing conversation instead of the other way around. A property that can only be seen three days a week will take longer to sell than one that can be seen any time. That’s not a defect to hide, it’s a fact to plan around — you either accept a longer timeline or you price for the smaller pool who can work with it. What you cannot do is assume the restriction is free.
What tenants do to your buyer pool
They split it, and the two halves want opposite things.
Investors read a tenanted property as a running business. Existing rent, existing tenants, income from day one. For them the tenancies are the point.
Owner-occupiers read the same listing as a problem to solve. They need the house empty on possession day, and they’re doing arithmetic about notice periods and compensation before they write.
You cannot fully satisfy both, and pretending otherwise produces a listing that appeals to nobody. The useful move is to decide early which buyer this house is really for, then be straight in the marketing about what the next owner inherits.
What I’d tell any seller with renters
Know your tenancy paperwork before you list. Fixed term or month to month, what rent is actually being paid, what notice is required. A buyer’s agent will ask, and “I’ll have to check” reads as risk.
Know exactly what your suite is and isn’t. Permitted, non-conforming, or something else. This is not a place for optimistic language on a listing sheet. Get the accurate answer, put the accurate answer out there, and let the buyer decide what it’s worth.
Build the showing restriction into the plan on day one. Not as an apology halfway through when the listing is stale.
The sale went through. The part I’d point at isn’t the outcome, it’s that nothing about the tenancies surprised anybody at any point — not the buyers, not the tenants, not the sellers.
The full rules on selling with tenants in BC · How I approach a listing · See other work
