At Caseway, we read case law for a living. Our systems ingest tribunal and court decisions across Canada and surface the patterns that human readers, working one file at a time, tend to miss.
After running our pipelines across the publicly available BC Residential Tenancy Branch corpus for 2025 and into 2026, one thing is clear. The story the headlines tell about BC tenancy law and the story the decisions tell are different stories.
Headlines fixate on 27% rent increases, serial renovictors and pensioners forced from $780-a-month apartments. Those cases are real, and several have produced important Supreme Court reversals in the last twelve months. But the modal RTB file in 2025 is far quieter. That typical file turns instead on a missed five-day deadline, a wrong form, a service-of-documents defect or a landlord who included a $35 NSF charge in a ten-day notice and watched the whole notice fall apart for it.
Executive summary.
The single lesson running through the 2025 and 2026 RTB corpus is that most disputes are decided on procedure and evidence, not on who is morally right. Forms, deadlines, eligible charges and paper trails decide the typical file. For the people on both sides of these hearings, that points in two directions.
For tenants: deadlines are everything. Five, ten, 21 and 30 days each carry consequences and a dispute filed late is usually deemed accepted. Keep dated photos, texts and written requests, because the better paper trail tends to win. A notice is not a foregone eviction, and many fail on form alone.
For landlords and property owners: the operational details are unforgiving. Use the RTB portal, get the math and the eligible charges right, name the correct family member for personal use, document occupancy and put utility and parking terms in writing. A single defective form can sink an otherwise valid case.
The rent increase debate is happening above the cap, not below it.
Start with the easy part. BC's allowable rent increase was 3.5% in 2024, 3.0% in 2025 and 2.3% in 2026, the latter announced August 26, 2025 and tied for the second straight year to the BC Consumer Price Index. The vast majority of rent-increase disputes the RTB hears are not about whether the cap was reasonable.
They are about whether a landlord used the right form (RTB-7), gave three full months' notice and waited the full twelve months since the last increase. When any of those elements fails, arbitrators routinely cancel the increase under section 43 and tenants are entitled to withhold the difference. This is not just an interesting law. It is an evidence and calendar problem, and landlords lose it with surprising frequency.
The genuinely contested ground is above-guideline applications under section 23 of the Regulation. The well-known Kriss Canada decision in May 2024 granted a fourplex landlord an additional rent increase of 23.5% on top of the cap, citing variable mortgage rates that tripled. Then-minister Ravi Kahlon called it the first such case the ministry had recorded since 2021. It remains an outlier.
TRAC (the Tenant Resource and Advisory Centre) counsel Robert Patterson has called for the financing-cost mechanism to be repealed entirely. The more common above-guideline decision in 2025, like Decision 1027 on a roof replacement, sees arbitrators wrestling with capital expenditure rules under section 23.1 and openly disagreeing with each other on whether "reasonable foreseeability" is even a legitimate consideration. Arbitrators are not bound by prior RTB decisions, and they say so in writing.
What this means: for tenants, almost every winnable rent-increase fight is a paperwork fight. Check the form, the three-month notice and the twelve-month gap before assuming the number itself is the problem. For landlords, the annual cap is rarely worth contesting. The only real upside is an above-guideline application under section 23, and those turn on documented capital costs or financing, not on argument.
The renoviction story is mostly about forms.
The 2024 Bill 14 amendments rewrote BC's personal-use and renovation rules. As of June 18, 2025, landlord-use and purchaser-use notices must be generated through the RTB web portal as Forms RTB-32L and RTB-32P. Paper notices are void.
The notice period sits at three months, the dispute window at 21 days and the landlord or close family member must occupy for 12 months or pay the displaced tenant compensation equal to 12 months' rent under section 51(2). Five-plus-unit purpose-built rental buildings are now categorically exempt from personal-use evictions.
The data tells a clear story. Between July 2021 and March 2025, only 209 section 49.2 renoviction applications were filed in BC. Landlords were granted possession in roughly 21% of them. Roughly 75% of applications were either dismissed, withdrawn, or abandoned. The application requirement is doing what it was designed to do.
The 2025 Supreme Court jurisprudence has tightened the screws further. In Mangat v. Dhindsa, 2024 BCSC 2406, the court held that a landlord cannot use their own failure to issue a proper RTB-32 form as a shield against section 51 compensation.
In Lu v. Marchand, 2025 BCJ 812, the court upheld $17,500 in compensation against a landlord whose mother was supposed to move in and never did. In Homax Real Estate Services v. Arde, 2025 BCSC 2431, the court extended section 51 liability to property managers acting as agents.
And in the widely-covered Janet Fraser case from September 2025, Sukstorf J. set aside an RTB decision as patently unreasonable for failing to test the landlord's good faith against an identical empty unit in the same building.
TRAC's published analysis is that landlords have shifted from renovations to other no-fault routes. Tenants' advocates report that between 2016 and 2021, landlords evicted over 10% of BC tenants, mostly using “no-fault” evictions.
The cases where notices fail are rarely failing on dramatic good-faith findings. They are failing because the notice was on paper instead of the portal, because the landlord put a niece instead of a child as the moving-in family member, or because the dispute window was miscounted.
What this means: for tenants, a personal-use or renovation notice is not a foregone eviction. Most fail, and they fail on form and timing, so the first move is to check the notice was issued through the portal, names a qualifying occupant and was disputed inside 21 days. For landlords, a personal-use eviction is now an application you have to win, not a notice you simply serve. Use the portal forms, name the right family member and treat the 12-month occupancy promise as enforceable, because section 51 compensation now reaches agents and property managers too.
Procedure, not merit, is doing the work.
This is the pattern our analysis surfaces most consistently. Across categories, a clear majority of RTB outcomes turn on procedural and evidentiary defects rather than the substantive merits. Tenants miss the five-day window to dispute a 10-day notice for unpaid rent and lose by default through the Direct Request stream. Landlords include ineligible charges and watch the notice void.
Material-term breaches under section 47(1)(h) are dismissed because no prior written warning was issued. Repeated late rent claims under 47(1)(b) collapse on the Guevara v. Louie estoppel doctrine because the landlord accepted late payments for years without warning. In hearings, parties show up without contemporaneous text messages, dated photos, or written repair requests and arbitrators apply balance-of-probabilities credibility findings to whoever brought the better paper.
What this means: for both sides, the hearing is won or lost before it starts. Diarize every deadline, file disputes early and serve evidence more than seven days out. For tenants, keep dated photos, texts and written repair requests, because the party with the better paper trail usually prevails on a balance of probabilities. For landlords, issue written warnings before relying on a breach and do not let a pattern of accepted late rent quietly waive your right to enforce it.
The Bill 44 multiplex wave has not yet arrived.
BC's small-scale multi-unit housing legislation has driven a province-wide construction wave, but the RTB decision database does not yet show concentrated multiplex litigation. Most of those projects are still leasing up. What we are seeing in 2025 and 2026 are the precursor disputes. Section 4(c) jurisdictional fights over whether tenants share a kitchen or bathroom with the owner. Shared utility allocation cases where lease ambiguity gets construed against the landlord.
Parking disputes are being treated as section 27 services or facilities, requiring 30 days' written notice and an equivalent rent reduction before a landlord can alter or remove them. Strata bylaw enforcement against tenants in stratified multiplex units keeps landing at the RTB, where arbitrators have repeatedly declined jurisdiction and pointed parties to the Strata Property Act. Expect multiplex disputes to dominate case volume in 2027 and 2028.
What this means: for landlords building or renting out multiplex units, write the lease now to avoid the fights that are coming. Spell out utility allocation, define parking and other facilities and confirm whether the unit even falls under the Residential Tenancy Act before relying on it. For tenants, ambiguity in a multiplex lease tends to be read against the landlord, parking cannot be removed without 30 days' notice and a rent reduction and strata bylaw problems usually belong before the strata, not the RTB.
What this means for both sides.
For landlords, the operational reality is unforgiving. Use the portal. Get the math right. Document occupancy meticulously when relying on personal use. Specify utility allocation in writing. Treat the 12-month occupancy obligation as a calendar event, not an aspiration.
For tenants, deadlines are everything. Five days, ten days, 21 days, 30 days, depending on the notice type. Disputes filed late are deemed accepted. Evidence served less than seven days before a hearing is routinely refused. Judicial review at BC Supreme Court within 60 days is the only real corrective when an arbitrator gets it wrong, and roughly 1% of cases ever travel that route.
The headlines will keep finding the dramatic cases, and they should. But anyone making decisions in this market should read the underlying corpus. The law on the page and the law as it is actually applied, dispute by dispute, are not always the same thing.
