Rooming & Co-Living Houses
The industry — Rooming and boarding houses
Base industry report for 7213 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 332
- Under 10 employeesA
- 51%
Of 332 Canadian establishments with employees, 51% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
Structure decidesThe binding constraint is not executional. Being better than the incumbent does not, by itself, get you in — this one is cleared with capital, an asset, or a permission.
Raise or borrow the entry ticket, or buy an operator who has already paid it. The barrier is money rather than permission, so it yields to a balance sheet — and an acquisition is usually cheaper than a start.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
Companies named in this market · 4
The binding constraint — entry cost + regulatory drag
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.
Zoning and licensing are set street by street, and a use permitted on one block is prohibited on the next. Sized by licensable rooms in one zone.
$1.968B of 2022 US receipts divided by 1,456 establishments with employees; the 2017 equivalent was $925K across 1,887. The figure is not a rooming house — NAICS 721310 bundles dormitories and workers' camps with rooming and boarding houses, and the camps carry the revenue. A rooming house with no employees never enters either count.
Who you would be competing with
The operators already at scale here, and whoever is buying these businesses. In most of these industries the competition an entrant meets is local, so this is who sets the terms rather than a list of everyone in the trade.
Financials & market size — sourced
Figures that came from a filing, a results release or reputable reporting, each carrying its evidence tier.
Market size, derived
Built from the competitor set upward rather than quoted from a forecast. Published TAMs in these categories are frequently reverse-engineered from each other, so any published figure is checked against the vendor arithmetic rather than trusted on its own.
Disclosed revenue from 1 of 4 named vendors. The market is at least this large.
No vendor has both a disclosed revenue and a published share.
Only a revenue floor is known — the true market is larger by whatever the undisclosed vendors earn.
Competitor set · 4 named · 1 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Civeo CorpNYSE: CVEOA | $639M | — | FY2025 revenue; Canadian segment $178.6M |
| Municipal and non-profit supportive-housing providersUNVERIFIED | not disclosed | — | The actual acquirers of rooming-house stock in Canadian cities; funded rather than traded, and no transaction series was opened for this record |
| Purpose-built student and co-living residencesC | not disclosed | — | Compete for the same single-room tenant in university cities; no Canadian operator's figures were opened for this record |
| Unincorporated landlordsUNVERIFIED | not disclosed | — | The majority of the format. They employ nobody, so they are absent from both the Statistics Canada and the US Census counts — the competitive field here is largely unmeasured |
Evidence
Evidence. US receipts, site counts and employment for NAICS 721310 were read in the US Census Bureau's own 2022 and 2017 Economic Census data files (EC2272BASIC and EC1772BASIC) [A]; per-site figures are arithmetic on them. Civeo Corp's FY2025 revenue and Canadian segment revenue were read in its 10-K for the year ended 31 December 2025, filed 3 March 2026, in the segment table [A] — not from a summary. The Canadian site count is Statistics Canada, December 2023 [A]. What these do NOT establish: none of them measures a rooming house. NAICS 721310 bundles rooming and boarding houses with dormitories and workers' camps, the camps carry the revenue, and an owner-operated rooming house with no employees appears in no count on this record. No rent, vacancy or licensing series was opened, and no municipality's rooming-house by-law was read. The 2017-to-2022 comparison spans the pandemic. The cut — that permitting and licensing, not capital, is what stops this — remains analyst judgment and was not tested against operators.
Where the industry talks
The associations, forums and events where people in this trade actually talk shop — where to listen before entering, and where the first customers are found. Each link was opened on the date shown.
National rental-housing association; site says it serves owners, managers and builders of nearly one million rental suites. Related CFAA domain blocks automated access.
Ontario landlord and property-manager association; site lists membership, certified rental building program, events and advocacy.
US professional association for residential property managers, including small multi-unit and single-family operators.
Large open forum where small landlords discuss rent-by-the-room, house hacking and tenant management.
Canadian rental-housing trade magazine; RSS feed shows posts dated September 2026.
Coliving trade media platform with articles, events and jobs. Post dates are not visible without JavaScript, so recency is unconfirmed.
There is no rooming-house association; operators are unincorporated landlords, so the bodies listed are general rental-housing and property-management ones. Landlord's Self-Help Centre (lshc.ca) and coliv.org now serve parked pages.