About Van People

Van People

Overview

Van People, known in Chinese as 人在温哥华 (Ren Zai Wen Ge Hua, "People in Vancouver"), is a Chinese-language online news and community portal serving Metro Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The site at vanpeople.com combines local news and practical information with one of the city's busiest Chinese-language classifieds marketplaces, covering jobs, housing, buying and selling, local services and community discussion. It is aimed squarely at Chinese-speaking residents of the Vancouver area — established immigrants, newcomers and international students — and functions as a daily starting point for readers looking for work, a home, a used car or a local tradesperson. Van People is one of a small group of Chinese community portals that dominate this niche in the city, alongside Vansky and Westca. Web analytics estimates compiled by Semrush put the site's traffic at roughly 200,000 visits in August 2026, with about three quarters of visitors located in Canada — figures that, while third-party estimates rather than audited numbers, indicate a substantial and primarily local readership. Business listings place the operation's office in Burnaby, within Metro Vancouver.

History

Van People has been part of Vancouver's Chinese-language media landscape since at least the mid-2010s. A 2015 blog post hosted by the University of British Columbia compared it with the city's other Chinese community websites as an established local resource, and its name — "People in Vancouver" — reflects the settlement-focused mission it has kept since: helping Chinese speakers live, work and settle in the city. The portal's growth has tracked the continuing arrival of Mandarin- and Cantonese-speaking immigrants and students in Metro Vancouver, one of the largest Chinese diaspora communities in North America. Van People has also surfaced in policy discussion about Chinese-language media in Canada: a report by the Munk School-affiliated MIREMS research programme on diaspora media dynamics quoted and referenced "the Vancouver-based Van People Chinese website" in its examination of how Chinese-language outlets in Canada covered the debate over foreign interference. The site has expanded from the web into mobile apps, and its Android app was still being actively updated in 2026, more than a decade after the portal first appears in the documented record. That longevity matters in its market: Vancouver's Chinese-language web has seen many community sites come and go, and the surviving portals are those that became daily habits. Van People's persistence through the 2010s and into the mid-2020s, with traffic-analysis services still recording it among the city's most-visited Chinese community sites in 2026, places it in that surviving group.

Programming and Content

Van People's content falls into two broad halves: information and classifieds. The information side carries local and community news relevant to Chinese-speaking residents of Metro Vancouver — municipal and provincial affairs, immigration and education matters, community events and practical guides to life in the city — alongside reader discussion forums. The classifieds side is the engine of the site. Its busiest sections are job postings, with employment searches ranking among the most common queries that bring readers to the site; rental and property listings for Vancouver, Burnaby, Richmond and the wider region; a second-hand marketplace for vehicles, furniture and everyday goods; and directories of local services, from tutors and movers to restaurants and immigration consultants. In its app-store description, the platform says that hundreds of new listings are posted to it every day across categories including jobs, housing, buy-and-sell and services. Forum discussion reflects the same settlement focus, with readers exchanging experience on immigration procedures, schooling, driving, taxation and everyday bureaucracy in British Columbia, in Chinese, for an audience that often cannot get the same peer advice from English-language sources. The result is less a conventional news site than a full community noticeboard with news attached: readers come for a tenancy or a job and stay for the local coverage and forums.

Audience and Reach

Van People's audience is the Chinese-speaking population of Metro Vancouver, a community numbering in the hundreds of thousands across Vancouver, Richmond, Burnaby and neighbouring municipalities. Semrush's estimates for mid-2026 show the scale of the portal's use: about 213,000 visits in July 2026 and about 200,000 in August 2026, with roughly 76 per cent of traffic originating in Canada, followed by smaller shares from the United States and China. The strongest search demand associated with the site is for its own brand name and for job listings, which underlines its role as a habitual destination rather than a site readers stumble upon. Its app-store description addresses it explicitly to "old and new immigrants and international students" looking for life and classified information in Vancouver, and its Google Play listing — an average rating of 4.8 stars from over 400 reviews when checked in 2026 — suggests an engaged repeat user base. Within Canada's Chinese-language media, Van People is consistently ranked by traffic-analysis services alongside Vansky as one of the two leading Vancouver community portals.

Digital Presence

The portal's home is vanpeople.com, a Chinese-language site organised around its news, forum and classified sections. Mobile access is a significant part of the service: the "人在温哥华VanPeople" app on Google Play lets users browse and post listings, follow local information and manage their accounts from a phone, and it remains under active development, with an update released in May 2026. The site's traffic profile reflects this habitual, service-driven use — direct visits and brand searches dominate, in the pattern typical of marketplace platforms. Van People's presence in third-party research, including the MIREMS diaspora media report, also shows the portal being treated as part of the recognised Chinese-language media infrastructure of the city. Its office presence in Metro Vancouver business listings, categorised as a media agency and shown as operating, further anchors what is primarily a digital service in the local business community it serves.

Ownership and Organisation

Public information about Van People's corporate ownership is limited: the portal does not prominently publicise a parent company or founder in the sources available, and no independent profile of its ownership could be verified for this article, so none is asserted here. What is documented is the shape of the operation. Business listings for VanPeople show an office at Suite 1028, Metrotower II, 4720 Kingsway, Burnaby, British Columbia — in the Metrotown district, a major commercial centre for the region's Chinese community — listed as an active media agency with weekday office hours. The organisation's work combines editorial and platform functions: publishing local news and community information, operating the classifieds marketplace and its moderation, maintaining the website and mobile apps, and selling advertising and featured listings to local businesses that want to reach Chinese-speaking customers. Listings from employers, landlords, agents and service providers across Metro Vancouver are posted to the platform daily, giving the small organisation an outsized role in the everyday economic life of the community it serves.

Contact and Availability

Van People is available online at vanpeople.com and through its mobile app, 人在温哥华VanPeople, on Google Play. Business listings give its office address as Suite 1028, Metrotower II, 4720 Kingsway, Burnaby, BC, with the telephone number (778) 686-6618 and weekday hours of 10:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. The service is published in Chinese and is directed at readers across Metro Vancouver, including Vancouver, Burnaby, Richmond and Surrey. Users can post and browse classified listings — jobs, housing, buy-and-sell and services — through the website and app, and readers can follow its local news and community forums online. As a digital-only outlet, it has no print edition or broadcast signal; the website and app are its complete points of availability.