The highrise skyline gets the headlines. The carriage home opportunity sits a few blocks back, on the older single-family streets around it.
Written by Serge, Founder, Kelowna Carriage Homes
Downtown Kelowna is really two real estate markets sharing a postal code. One is the highrise condo core along the lake and Bernard Avenue, where towers like Water Street by the Park, three towers and 650 condo units, with Tower One sold out and Tower Two, Eli, priced from $669,999 and expected to complete in 2026, are adding hundreds of units at once. Citywide, 38 projects were recently under construction, adding 6,439 units across 282 storeys, with 2026 alone bringing roughly 3,995 new units across 15 major projects.
The other is the surrounding grid of older single-family and duplex streets, roughly the blocks around Abbott, Ellis, Cawston, and into the Marshall Street area, zoned for lower density under City of Kelowna Zoning Bylaw No. 12375. That second market, not the highrise core, is where a carriage home actually fits: highrise-zoned parcels are typically built to their maximum permitted density already and have no room for a detached backyard structure.
If your property falls into that second category, our Downtown Kelowna neighbourhood page covers zoning specifics for that area.
Reported pricing puts a studio condo downtown around $400,000 and a genuine two-bedroom with parking in the $600,000 to $700,000 range. Those numbers are a useful benchmark for what tenants downtown already pay for less space than a purpose-built carriage home offers; CMHC’s 2025 Kelowna two-bedroom average of $2,118 a month looks reasonable against that backdrop, not expensive.
The volume of construction downtown also explains why Kelowna’s short-term rental subzone, tourist-commercial zoning that lets certain buildings opt out of the province’s principal-residence rule, is concentrated in exactly this area. That exemption, effective June 1, 2026, applies to those rezoned buildings, not to a residential carriage home a few blocks away; see the rental strategy guide for how that distinction plays out for a carriage home owner specifically.
We do not have a downtown-specific vacancy or rent survey to point to; CMHC’s published breakdown covers the City of Kelowna and the wider Central Okanagan, not individual neighbourhoods. Within the City of Kelowna, vacancy rose from 4.1% to 6.9% in 2025; across the wider Central Okanagan CMA it rose from 3.8% to 6.4%, the highest of any major Canadian metro that year. Downtown, with its concentration of new supply, is a reasonable candidate for sitting at or above the city-wide figure, but that is an inference, not a sourced downtown number, and we say so plainly rather than inventing one.
The $2,118-a-month two-bedroom average and the other CMHC figures used across this site are Kelowna-wide averages. A well-located, newly built two-bedroom carriage home downtown would reasonably be expected to rent at or above that average, in line with how new supply typically prices relative to existing stock.
Older Downtown lots tend to be narrower than lots in Mission or Rutland, which usually means building up rather than out, and a variance is sometimes needed to fit a carriage home within setbacks. This is standard, not unusual, and it is handled as part of permits and zoning; see the building permits guide for how that process runs.
BC’s small-scale multi-unit housing rules (Bill 44) apply to Downtown lots the same as anywhere else in the city, generally widening what a given lot can build rather than restricting it.
A Downtown lot outside the highrise core is a reasonable carriage home candidate, provided it has the site coverage and can meet, or get a variance for, setback requirements. The construction boom nearby is a demand signal for rental housing generally, not a reason to expect above-average rent without confirming your lot’s specifics first.
Just north of the downtown core, the Capri-Landmark area is planned for roughly 1,600 condo units across 7 highrise towers, part of Kelowna’s designated Urban Centre network rather than the downtown peninsula itself. It is a useful comparison point: like the downtown highrise core, Capri-Landmark is being built to a density that leaves no room for a detached carriage home, so the same rule applies there as it does downtown, high-density multi-family zoning and single-family carriage-home potential are two different parts of the map, not the same streets.
For an owner deciding whether a specific lot is a highrise-zoned parcel or a lower-density residential one, the City’s zoning map, or a quick conversation as part of a feasibility study, settles it before any design work starts.
The standard 3-to-5-month design-and-permitting window described on the building permits guide tends to run toward the longer end of that range for an older Downtown lot, mainly because narrower lots are more likely to need a variance for setbacks or site coverage. That extra review track is normal, not a sign of a problem with the property; it is simply worth planning around rather than assuming the shortest possible timeline.
Once permitted, the 5-to-8-month construction window is unaffected by the lot’s location; a Downtown build takes the same time to frame, service, and finish as one in any other part of the city, all else being equal.
Downtown’s built environment, walkable to restaurants, the lake, and now a large share of the city’s new supply, tends to draw tenants who value location over square footage: young professionals and downsizers rather than families needing a yard. A one- or two-bedroom carriage home generally fits that profile better than a larger unit would, which lines up with the CMHC one- and two-bedroom averages, $1,596 and $2,118 a month, being the more relevant benchmarks here than the three-bedroom figure used elsewhere on this site.
This is a reasonable generalization about tenant preference, not a guarantee; a family-sized unit can still rent well where a lot supports it. It is simply the more common fit for a Downtown-area carriage home, worth factoring into the layout decisions covered in the design ideas guide.
It is also a reason a Downtown carriage home is less exposed to the large-scale competing supply discussed above than it might first appear: the highrise towers adding thousands of condo units compete most directly with each other and with resale condos, not with a detached backyard rental aimed at a tenant who specifically wants a house-like unit with its own yard access.
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Costs, timelines, rents, and incentive amounts on this page are estimates from the sources cited, current as of September 2026. Each is confirmed in writing in your free feasibility study. Licensed and insured; documentation available on request.