Vancouver has held its seventh-place ranking as a Canadian destination city for U-Haul moving trucks for the second year in a row, but arrivals of the mostly middle-class movers dropped more than 10% in 2016 from a year earlier.
“Vancouver witnessed a 10.5% slide in annual arrivals and yet remained the seventh-busiest Canadian market for incoming U-Haul trucks,” said U-Haul International spokeswoman Andrea Batchelor in releasing the company’s annual top 10 Canadian destination cities. Toronto was ranked as the No. 1 U-Haul destination city in 2016, taking the top spot from Calgary, which slipped to second place after posting a 10.2% decline in arrivals from a year earlier. Montreal, Edmonton, Ottawa and London also ranked higher than Vancouver in 2016 for incoming U-Haul moving trucks.
Victoria, the only other B.C. city in the top 10 rankings, fell from the No. 9 spot to No. 10 in 2016 after posting a 6.6% drop in U-Haul arrivals from a year earlier.
U-Haul moving data can be a demographically important signal, noted Vancouver real estate consultant Ozzie Jurock.
“The poor stuff everything into a borrowed truck; the wealthy use top-tier moving companies. The average working population goes with U-Haul,” Jurock said.
The U-Haul migration trends report was compiled from more than 1.7 million one-way U-Haul truck transactions in Canada during 2016. Batchelor noted that No. 1 Toronto witnessed a 13.4% increase in year-over-year arrivals to rise one spot from its 2015 ranking and reclaim its status as the busiest Canadian city for incoming U-Haul trucks.
