Investing

Buying a Fourplex in Edmonton: What the Sold Data Actually Shows

By Christopher Peel, REALTOR®June 7, 202612 min read

Here’s the part most “invest in Edmonton real estate” articles won’t tell you: at today’s rates, a single-family rental or a condo loses money every month. The cap rate sits below the mortgage rate, so you pay to hold it. But that’s only half the story — because in Edmonton, cash flow lives in doors, and the fourplex is where the math finally works.

This isn’t a hunch. It’s what falls out of a comprehensive analysis of real Edmonton sales — every property type, with the actual property taxes, condo fees, and (for the multi-unit set) the rent rolls disclosed in the listings. Here’s what the data shows, and how to run your own deal at the end.

Why a Single Rental Doesn’t Cash Flow Right Now

A rental property’s monthly cash flow is simple: rent, minus operating costs (tax, insurance, maintenance, vacancy), minus the mortgage. The cap rate — net operating income divided by price — tells you the return before financing. The rule of thumb: when the cap rate is below your mortgage rate, leverage works against you and the property bleeds cash monthly.

That’s exactly where Edmonton’s single-unit rentals sit today. Run the median condo and the median house through the math at 20% down and a 4.5% mortgage, and both come out negative:

Property	Median Price	Cap Rate	Monthly Cash Flow
Condo (apartment)	$232,500	3.66%	−$321/mo
House, no suite	$475,000	3.61%	−$674/mo
House + legal suite	$530,000	5.04%	−$121/mo
Fourplex (4 doors)	$743,000	6.76%	+$894/mo

Median sale price, property tax, and condo fees from a comprehensive analysis of real Edmonton sales. 20% down, 4.5% rate, 25-yr amortization, 3.9% vacancy (CMHC), 5% maintenance, self-managed. Rents: CMHC and disclosed rent rolls.

The condo bleeds $321 a month; the plain house, $674. Their cap rates — around 3.6% — are well under the 4.5% you’re paying to borrow. You’d be buying for appreciation and mortgage paydown, subsidizing the property out of pocket every month to get there. That’s a real strategy, but it’s not the cash-flowing investment most people picture.

Cash Flow Lives in Doors

Look down that table again and the pattern is unmistakable: as you add doors, the economics flip. The same dollar of property buys more rent when it’s split into rentable units, while the big fixed costs — land, foundation, roof, your time — get shared across them.

One door (condo or house): cap rate ~3.6%, cash-flow negative. You hold it for appreciation.
Two doors (a house with a legal basement suite): cap rate jumps to about 5.0%, and you’re roughly at break-even. One mortgage, two rents.
Four doors (a fourplex): cap rate around 6.8% and genuinely cash-flow positive — about +$894/month on the median deal.

This is the quiet reason experienced Edmonton investors gravitate to small multifamily. It’s not glamour — it’s that the fourplex is where the rent finally outruns the mortgage.

What the Fourplex Data Actually Shows

Edmonton fourplexes don’t always announce themselves — many trade as residential listings, not commercial ones. Filtering the sold data to genuine four-door properties (purpose-built fourplexes plus the full side-by-side duplexes with a legal suite on each side that deliver four rentable units), a clear picture emerges:

Typical price: the median four-door property sold for $743,000, with most trading between roughly $435,000 and $1.25 million depending on age, location, and unit mix.
Real cap rates: among the listings that disclosed their rent roll, returns clustered between about 6% and 11% — the higher end on fully-tenanted, well-located buildings. A conservative read on the median deal lands near 6.8%.
Where they are: the active four-door inventory concentrated in mature, rentable neighbourhoods — Allendale, Bonnie Doon, Highlands, Montrose, and the university corridor — where tenant demand is deep and steady.

Real examples from the period make it concrete: a 2013-built fourplex in Montrose at $982,500; a turnkey four-plex near the University of Alberta in Allendale at $950,000; a fully legally-suited side-by-side delivering four units in Bonnie Doon at $925,000. These aren’t pro-forma fantasies — they’re closed sales.

Two Ways In: Investor or House-Hacker

A fourplex isn’t only for someone with deep pockets. There are two genuinely different doors into one, and the down payment is what separates them.

1. The investor: 20% down, rent all four

Buy it purely as an investment and you’ll put 20% down — about $148,600 on the median $743,000 building — and rent all four units. On the numbers above, that’s roughly +$894/month in cash flow at a 6.8% cap rate, before you count appreciation or principal paydown.

2. The house-hacker: live in one, rent three

Here’s the path most people don’t realize exists. If you live in one of the four units, a fourplex qualifies as an owner-occupied home — which means you can buy it with as little as 5% down (about $49,300 on the median building, plus mortgage insurance), not 20%. You live in one unit and your three tenants pay most of the mortgage.

Run that out and your net cost to live — full mortgage and operating costs, minus the $4,350 from three rented units — comes to roughly $961/month. That’s less than the cost of renting a comparable place in Edmonton — except you’re building equity in a $743,000 appreciating asset, with tenants paying it down. After a few years you can move out, rent the fourth unit, and you own a cash-flowing fourplex.

The Five-Year Picture

Cash flow is only one of the three ways a property pays you. The other two — your tenants paying down the mortgage, and the building appreciating — compound quietly in the background. Project the median fourplex forward five years at a conservative 3% annual appreciation (below the detached market’s recent pace), and the total return — cash flow plus paydown plus appreciation — comes to roughly $244,516 on the $152,343 of cash you put in to buy it. That’s the difference between an asset that pays you to own it and one you simply hope goes up.

Run the Numbers on a Real Deal

Every property is its own deal — the rents, the condo fees, the condition, the down payment, the rate you can actually negotiate. The medians above are a starting point, not an answer. The best thing you can do before you fall in love with (or write off) a listing is run it through the math honestly.

That’s exactly what our Edmonton investment property calculator is built for. Punch in a real price and rent, choose 1 to 4 units, flip the owner-occupied switch to see the house-hack version, and it returns the cap rate, cash flow, cash-on-cash return, and a five-year projection — using live Bank of Canada rates, CMHC rents, and the current Edmonton mill rate. No sign-up, no pitch — just the numbers.