San Francisco Landlord Compliance · End a tenancy

Purchaser-Occupancy Notice Period | British Columbia

For notices generated on or after August 21, 2024, a buyer taking over a rental property gives the tenant three months' notice, not four. That number only existed for five weeks before the province rolled part of it back, and the reason why says a lot about what these notice periods are actually trying to balance.

Written by Platuni

The short answer

1.For notices generated on or after August 21, 2024, a purchaser-occupancy eviction requires three months' notice and gives the tenant 21 days to dispute.
2.This was a partial rollback. On July 18, 2024, the province had just raised the requirement to four months and 30 days for both landlord's-use and purchaser's-use notices.
3.The four-month version created a real problem for buyers using CMHC-insured mortgages, which require vacant possession at closing. BC carved purchaser's-use back out five weeks later.
4.Landlord's-use notices stayed at four months and 30 days until June 2025, so for about ten months the two notice types ran on different timelines.
5.A property sale by itself never ends a tenancy. The purchaser has to ask, in writing, after every condition of the sale is satisfied, specifically to occupy the unit.
6.Notices generated before August 21, 2024 still follow the four-month, 30-day rule, which matters if an older dispute is still working its way through the system.

This applies if you're

· A landlord issuing a notice to end tenancy on behalf of a buyer who wants to occupy the unit
· A buyer, or a close family member of the buyer, planning to move into a purchased rental property

This doesn't apply if you're

· A landlord ending a tenancy for your own occupancy, which now follows the same three-month timeline but got there separately, in June 2025
· Selling a rental property without the buyer intending to occupy it, since the sale alone doesn't end the tenancy

A rule that lasted five weeks

On July 18, 2024, British Columbia raised the notice period for both landlord's-use and purchaser's-use evictions from two months to four, and extended the tenant's dispute window from 15 days to 30. The stated goal was curbing bad-faith evictions, where an eviction claim of personal use turned out not to be genuine. [Cite: British Columbia, Residential Tenancy Regulation amendments, Jul. 18, 2024]

That four-month rule didn't last long for one of the two categories. On August 21, 2024, just over a month later, the province rolled it back specifically for purchaser's-use notices, cutting the period to three months and the dispute window to 21 days. [Cite: CBC News, "B.C. updates notice period for personal-use evictions," Aug. 2, 2024]

Why the rollback happened

The province's own explanation centered on mortgage financing, not tenant protection. A four-month notice period could conflict with the requirements of a Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation insured mortgage, which generally requires the property to be vacant at closing. A longer notice period risked leaving a buyer unable to close on schedule, or unable to qualify for CMHC-backed financing in the first place, particularly for first-time buyers. [Cite: CBC News, "B.C. updates notice period for personal-use evictions," Aug. 2, 2024]

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.