The four-year contour line

IThe silence in Brentwood

If you stand at the corner of Lougheed Highway and Beta Avenue in Burnaby on a weekday afternoon, you can hear the truth about the BC presale market without anyone telling it to you.

There is a 34-storey concrete tower at 2381 Beta Avenue. It is roughly 95 percent complete. The reported unit count varies with the filing — 329 per Thind Properties, 335 per the senior lender — and somewhere in the range of 224 to 235 of those units were pre-sold to retail buyers across 2021 through 2023 (CBC reports 232; KingSett's filings cite 224; Storeys 235). From the street, the building looks finished — glass on most of the floors, balconies in place, the silhouette of a home for a thousand people against the Brentwood skyline.

There are no construction sounds coming from it. The City of Burnaby has suspended the building permits. The senior lender, KingSett Mortgage Corp., was owed $189 million on Eclipse alone as of late December 2024, and approximately $500 million across the developer's broader portfolio of stalled BC residential projects. Interest on the Eclipse facilities alone — the $189-million senior debt plus the secondary tranches — accrues at approximately $54,000 per day, per the KingSett affidavit reported by Storeys.

The tower's crane is still up there. Idle.

That silence is the signal. The headline numbers — sales down, prices off — describe a market correction. The crane describes something larger: a four-year break in the BC condominium supply pipeline that will reshape what every resale buyer and every resale seller can do until at least the end of the decade.

IIThe number that does the work

In the first three months of 2025, Metro Vancouver had 152 new concrete presale-tower launches. In the first three months of 2026, the total number was zero. Not "down by half," not "soft." Zero — per Zonda Home Canada's tracking, reported by Business in Vancouver.

Across all building types — concrete towers, wood-frame mid-rises, townhouse projects — the Lower Mainland released just 64 presale units in February 2026, per the MLA Canada data Daily Hive reported. In a normal February, the figure is closer to a thousand. Q1 totals were depressed across the board: roughly 145 units in January and another 64 in February, with March largely empty of new launches.

IIIThe mechanics that produce a zero

To understand how a quarter ends with zero new concrete towers launched, you have to understand how BC builds concrete towers in the first place.

A 30-storey condominium in Metro Vancouver costs hundreds of millions of dollars to deliver, end-to-end. Hard construction costs run substantially higher per square foot for concrete than for wood-frame mid-rise; delivery time, dirt to occupancy, runs four to six years. Developers do not finance that on their own balance sheets. They sell roughly seventy percent of the units before construction begins — to local buyers, to investors, occasionally to offshore capital — and pledge those signed presale contracts to the senior lender as quasi-equity, which unlocks the construction loan. The 70-percent presale threshold is industry-standard across BC, the same threshold Polygon Realty's CEO Neil Chrystal recently told the Globe and Mail is unrealistic in current conditions.

By the second quarter of 2025, Metro Vancouver had thousands of presale units actively for sale, with the majority of projects below their 70-percent threshold. Below threshold means: financing has not unlocked. Construction has not begun. The presale buyer's deposit sits in a notary's trust account; the developer's lender sits on the next call.

The buyers stopped signing in the second half of 2024 and have not meaningfully resumed since. Presale prices set in 2021 and 2022 — at the cycle's peak — assumed a 2026 completion market that did not arrive. A 2022 buyer who locked in a $900,000 one-bedroom is, today, watching comparable resale units sell at $720,000. They are being asked to close, in 2026, at a number $180,000 above market. Some of them are choosing not to. The market for new contracts hasn't filled in behind them. Without new contracts, lenders won't release financing. Without financing, the tower doesn't launch. Zero towers, zero new financing, zero new presale buyers — a closed loop.

IVThe 1995 parallel — and why this time is different

For BC, this shape is familiar. In December 1995, Greater Vancouver carried 5,462 completed and unsold condominium units: the all-time inventory record. In December 2025, the count was 5,458. Four units apart. Thirty years apart.

The 1995 surplus had two roots. One was the post-Expo '86 construction boom: a decade of building cycles that out-ran absorption by the early 1990s. The other was Hong Kong capital flight ahead of the 1997 handover, which inflated demand through the late 1980s and early '90s, then evaporated when the 1997 Asian financial crisis froze the diaspora-capital flow feeding Vancouver. Inventory backed up. The next concrete-tower cycle in Greater Vancouver did not seriously restart until the early 2000s.

But the 1995 surplus carried a second, slower disaster: the Leaky Condo Crisis. Of the 159,979 strata units BC built between 1985 and 2000, roughly 45 percent developed envelope-leak problems. Total restoration cost: approximately $4 billion across 900-plus buildings and 31,000 units. The Barrett Commission followed in 1998. The BC Building Code was rewritten to mandate rainscreen detailing. Two cycles' worth of condo buyers spent two decades unwinding the consequences.

Surface-level, 2026 looks like 1995. Five thousand four hundred unsold units, against five thousand four hundred and sixty-two then. But the mechanics underneath are different in two ways that matter.

The first is the direction of failure. 1995 was a supply shock into a regional capital-flight market — too many finished units, then a sudden buyer freeze, with quality problems already baked into the inventory. 2026 is a demand collapse into a market with binding 70-percent presale covenants and an alternative exit (rental conversion) the 1990s did not have. The 1995 inventory was finished product looking for end users. The 2026 inventory is finished product plus a much larger shadow pipeline of presales that may never break ground.

The second is the regulatory toolkit. In 1995, an unsold concrete tower had two endings — fire-sale to a hold-and-rent investor, or quietly slow-sell over several years. The 2026 tower has a third path. CMHC's MLI Select program, launched in March 2022 and refined through subsequent updates, is the most influential housing-finance instrument in the country today: a federally-insured construction loan offering up to 95-percent loan-to-value at 50-year amortization, available only for purpose-built rental projects. The math is now cleaner for a developer carrying a stalled condo project to convert the building to rental and refinance through MLI Select than to fight the presale market for another two years. Several BC developers have already taken that exit.

The most visible example is Tangerine Developments in Surrey. The first of their two-tower project at 10054 to 10088 Whalley Boulevard — near the King George SkyTrain station — was originally marketed as a 33-storey condominium. In 2025, the developer flipped the entire tower to market rental: 379 units of presale condos became 379 units of purpose-built rental. Wesgroup did the same in New Westminster with The Nelson, a 294-unit project refinanced through a $135-million CMHC loan. Wesgroup separately cancelled the 204-unit Ardea project at Vancouver's River District in September 2025, citing higher-than-anticipated construction and delivery costs.

For the buyer trying to read the new-supply pipeline, the implication is uncomfortable. A meaningful share of what gets built in 2027 and 2028 won't be for sale at all. It will be owned by REITs, pension funds, and city-housing partnerships, and rented unit-by-unit on standard tenancy agreements. The ownership market and the rental market are not converging; they're decoupling.

VMohammadjavad Nadali, $40 a haircut, four years

In 2023, Mohammadjavad Nadali signed a presale contract on a one-bedroom at Eclipse at Lumina Brentwood. He was thirty years old, a Burnaby barber. As CBC's Jason Proctor reported, at forty dollars a haircut he had spent nearly four years saving the $38,295 he used as a down payment.

What Nadali says he did not know — what he was not told — was that the Canada Revenue Agency had registered an $11.9-million tax judgment against the developer's affiliated entities three months before he signed his contract. He did not know that the developer was reportedly negotiating with KingSett over project-level defaults across multiple sites. He did not know that fifteen months later the project would enter creditor protection.

Today, Nadali's tower stands at 95 percent completion in Brentwood. The crane is up. The building has an occupancy permit (issued April 10, 2026), and was deemed substantially complete by mid-March. He is one of more than three dozen buyers who have asked the BC Supreme Court to declare their contracts unenforceable on the grounds that the developer failed to disclose material facts. Their legal theory is the only theory BC law leaves them: not that prices fell — BC courts have repeatedly ruled that price decline does not constitute frustration of contract — but that the developer's silence on its own insolvency was, under the material-fact and rescission provisions of REDMA (sections 14, 21 and 22), a material non-disclosure that voids the contract from the start.

The case will set precedent for every other stranded BC presale buyer in 2026 and 2027. The legal architecture of that decision is covered in the companion piece on the Eclipse Tower assignment-holder guide.

VIThe contour line

In April 2026, Greater Vancouver's composite benchmark price was $1,098,000, down 6.9 percent from a year earlier. In May 2026, the Fraser Valley composite was $893,300, with the detached benchmark at $1,366,500 — down 7.9 percent year-over-year. The resale market in mid-2026 is, by any normal definition, a buyer's market: well-supplied inventory, soft prices, negotiable conditions. A patient buyer with financing in hand has more room today than in any quarter since 2020.

The decision that buyer is actually making, though, is not just about today. A concrete tower takes four to six years from launch to keys. If the Metro Vancouver launch count in Q1 2026 was zero, then the new-supply count in Q1 2030 is, mechanically, also zero. The buyers who would have bought new in 2027, 2028, and 2029 — first-time buyers, downsizers, investors, every cohort that has historically taken about a third of new-condo absorption — are coming back to the resale market. They will arrive over the next three years, against the same already-built inventory.

This is the four-year contour line. The current oversupply works through faster than most coverage suggests, because the pipeline behind it has gone dry. The supply pipeline doesn't refill until either the foreign-buyer rules change, or domestic rates fall enough to revive Canadian-buyer presale demand, or developers abandon the for-sale model in favour of permanent rental conversion at scale. None of those scenarios are guaranteed in 2026 — the policy fight that will decide the first of them is covered separately.

If you are a buyer, the question for the next eighteen months is not whether prices will drift another two or three percent. It is whether you would rather buy resale on soft 2026 prices against ample inventory, or buy resale in 2028 against the same inventory plus three years of frustrated demand.

If you are a seller of a well-priced detached home or townhouse in the Fraser Valley, the question is whether the soft comps of 2026 are the right frame for your decision, or whether the cleaner frame is the resale market a buyer will be looking at in 2028 — when new supply, for three years, was zero.

The 152-to-zero number isn't a market dip. It is, if it holds, the cleanest single data point we have for what BC residential real estate looks like for the rest of the decade.

A 34-storey tower in Brentwood is 95 percent finished. Its crane is still up. The question is what happens when it comes down — and what doesn't get built behind it for the next four years.