Purchaser-Occupancy Notice Period | British Columbia

That's a meaningfully different justification than the one behind the original four-month rule. The July 18 change was about protecting tenants from bad-faith claims of personal use. The August 21 rollback was about not accidentally blocking legitimate home purchases, and it only applied to the purchaser scenario, not the landlord's-use scenario, because that's specifically where the mortgage-timing conflict existed.

A tenant advocate at the Tenant Resource Advisory Centre publicly criticized the rollback at the time, arguing that the framework focuses on a purchaser's stated intent to occupy without weighing what losing housing actually means for the displaced tenant. That's worth knowing as context for why this particular carve-out drew pushback that the original four-month rule hadn't.

Sale doesn't equal eviction

It's worth stating plainly, because landlords sometimes assume otherwise: listing or selling a rental property doesn't by itself give grounds to end a tenancy. Under section 49 of the Residential Tenancy Act, a landlord can only issue a purchaser-occupancy notice once the sale agreement exists, every condition of that sale has been satisfied, and the purchaser has asked the landlord in writing to end the tenancy because the purchaser, or a close family member of the purchaser, intends to occupy the unit. [Cite: Residential Tenancy Act, s. 49]

For this purpose, a close family member means a spouse, parent, or child of the purchaser or the purchaser's spouse, not a broader category of relatives.

The transition rule, and what bad faith costs

Timing determines which set of rules applies. A purchaser-occupancy notice generated before August 21, 2024 still runs on the earlier four-month, 30-day terms. One generated on or after that date runs on three months and 21 days. The date the notice was generated is what controls, not when the underlying sale closed.

The occupancy requirement carries real consequences if it isn't genuine. The purchaser, or the close family member who took possession, has to actually occupy the unit for at least 12 months. If the unit isn't occupied for that period, or turns out to have been renovated shortly before the tenancy ended in a way that suggests the occupancy claim wasn't real, it can be found the tenancy was ended in bad faith. The penalty for that finding is an order to pay the displaced tenant 12 months' rent.