Accommodation and food services

The listings that look cheap are cheap for a reason: deferred capital sits behind the walls — roofs, envelopes, plumbing runs — and it comes due on the new owner's watch. Revenue arrives through OTAs that take a fifth of the rate, the season is short outside the major corridors, and short-term-rental supply has taken the price-sensitive traveller. The property management software at this code is screened separately.

The category's public experiment ended badly enough to settle the question. Vacasa listed via SPAC at a multi-billion valuation and was sold to Casago for about $130M at $5.30 a share, completing 30 April 2025 — the combined company manages more than 40,000 properties. That is what full-service vacation rental management is worth at scale: the operating cost of cleaning, maintenance and guest service scales linearly with units while the platform take rate does not, and Airbnb and Vrbo own the demand. Municipal short-term-rental restrictions add a regulatory ceiling that varies street by street.

A Canadian season is short, the revenue is weather-correlated, and the capital sits in serviced sites, septic and power that must be paid for whether or not July is wet. The real opportunity — ageing owners with no succession selling below replacement cost — is genuine, and it is a land acquisition play requiring patient capital rather than an operating business a new entrant can bootstrap. The listed comparable shows which half of that capital still earns. At Equity LifeStyle Properties, the continent's largest owner, FY2025 base rent from annual RV sites rose 4.7% while seasonal fell 7.5% and transient fell 3.0% — and inside its core portfolio the nightly and seasonal lines fell 8.5% and 9.9%, which ELS attributes partly to fewer returning Canadian guests [A]. Annual sites are a land lease with a cottage on it; the nightly business is the one a new owner is actually buying, and it is the one contracting.

Rooming houses are the cheapest form of housing to supply and the hardest to permit: most municipalities restrict them through zoning, licensing and parking minimums, and neighbourhood opposition is reliable. Operating is management-intensive per dollar of rent. Note the connection to the affordable-housing study at 531112 — this is the format that would close the gap that study describes, and the same municipal process blocks both.

The appeal is the low entry cost relative to a restaurant, and that is also the ceiling: a truck or a catering kitchen sells a fixed number of covers on a fixed number of days, and the good days are seasonal and weather-dependent. Commissary requirements and municipal vending rules limit where and when service is legal. Revenue scales by adding units, each of which needs its own operator — which is a staffing problem, not a growth engine.

Per-capita alcohol consumption is not a mood, it is a measured series, and it is falling faster than the fixed costs of a room. Statistics Canada records 6.8 litres of absolute alcohol sold per person aged 15 and over in 2024/2025, down from 8.3 in 2020/2021 and 8.0 in 2013/2014, and the dollar value of alcohol sales fell in nominal terms for a second straight year while every input price rose. Beer — the volume a pub actually turns — is down from 76.1 litres a head to 53.6 over the same period. The rent, the licence and the staff on a slow Tuesday do not decline with the trend line. Late-night licensing, liability and staffing make this the least forgiving hospitality format, and this is the rare screen where the demand curve can be read off an agency table rather than argued. The structure compounds it: 1,423 of 2,708 Canadian establishments employ fewer than ten people and 13 employ a hundred or more, so there is no scale operator to sell to and no franchise system carrying the format. An entrant buys a fixed cost base and rents a shrinking occasion.

A fit-out runs several hundred thousand dollars before a single cover, net margins in the single digits leave no room for a slow first year, and the delivery platforms take a cut large enough to invert the economics of the orders they bring. Included in this research deliberately: it is the most-considered entry in this list and the one where the arithmetic is least forgiving. The software sold to these operators is studied separately at the same code.