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What I'm watching
What actually moved
A turn has two halves. Sellers stop adding supply,
and then, usually later, buyers come back. The
first half is the one you can see early, and a
single month of sales is noise against it. This is
not noise.
Every month of 2026. Fraser Valley Real
Estate Board, all property types.
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In January there were 6.3% more homes for sale
here than a year earlier. By August there were
6.3% fewer. Eight months, one direction,
steepening rather than flattening. New listings
are down 15% on the year.
That is the first half: sellers leaving faster
than buyers. Sales are the second half, and they
lag. They are still bumping along: 941 in August,
1.1% above last August, in a month when they fell
13.6% from July.
Two things I would want to know if I were reading
this rather than writing it. That 1.1% covers all
property types, and inside the three most people
actually buy, sales did not rise: detached was
exactly flat at 332 against 332, townhouses fell
2%, apartments 7.5%. And it is the second time
this year, not the first. April was up 7.2%
against falling inventory too, and it did not
hold.
What is different is what sits behind it. In April
inventory was down 2.3%; in August it is down
6.3%. Greater Vancouver is not doing this at all.
Its inventory fell 2.7% while its sales fell 4.6%.
Everyone fell. Not everyone is still falling.
The bar is how far below its own peak each
market sits. The figure on the right is
its last three published months, which is
August everywhere except Montreal, where
it runs to June.
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Calgary and Edmonton barely corrected at all; both
are within a few per cent of their all-time highs.
Montreal is at its record high on its latest
reading, while we sit a quarter below ours.
Then there is Toronto, and Toronto is the one
worth watching, because Toronto is us. It sits
27.7% below its 2022 peak and we sit 26.9% below
ours. It has fallen slightly further than the
Fraser Valley, and over the last three months it
gave up 2.2% against our 2.6%.
That is not British Columbia being uniquely
broken. On the national index, thirteen markets
have fallen further from their peaks than the
Fraser Valley has, and every single one of them is
in southern Ontario. The deep falls happened in
two places: there, and here. Both are the places
that ran furthest in 2021.
And Toronto is doing what we are doing, harder.
Its active listings are down 11.3% from a year ago
and its new listings down 14.1%, against our 6.3%
and 15%. Sellers are backing out of both deep
markets at the same time.
The difference is which half has turned. Our sales
rose 1.1% in August. Toronto's fell 2.1%.
What a bottom actually looks like
Vancouver Island is the nearest thing we have to a
rehearsal: same province, same rates, same rules.
It fell 15% from its April 2022 peak and bottomed
in January 2023.
CREA MLS® Home Price Index, Vancouver
Island Real Estate Board area.
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Nothing marked that month at the time. No
announcement, no headline, no moment when it
became clear. It only became the bottom in
hindsight, once enough months had passed for the
shape to show.
Six months later prices were 8% higher. On a
$630,000 home that is $50,300, and it went to the
people who were already looking.
It is 11.7% above that low now and still 5.5%
under the old peak, so this is not a story about
prices rocketing. It is a story about the cheapest
month being invisible while you are standing in
it.
Ours would be a longer climb than theirs. A 27%
fall takes a 37% gain to undo, and Greater
Vancouver's 14% takes nearly 16%. The BC Real
Estate Association has prices still easing this
year before sales rise 7.7% in 2027, and their
chief economist calls that recovery "slow and
gradual".
Slow and gradual is fine. It is the months before
it that reward paying attention, and that is the
whole reason I send you the boring numbers every
month.
Get ready, not busy
A word on who this is for. If you own a home and
will buy another, the market mostly cancels out,
because you sell into the same conditions you buy
in. If you are buying your first home, or buying
to invest, it does not cancel out. A market like
this one is when your entry price gets decided,
and that is who the rest of this letter is written
for.
Three things, all free, none of which involve
talking to me.
Know your number.
The stress test guide
explains the rule and
the mortgage calculator
does the arithmetic. Set a
saved search
for the type and area you would actually buy, and
let it email you when something lands. And compare
properly:
the spreadsheet view
puts price per square foot, strata cost per foot
and days on market side by side, so the outliers
surface in one sort.
And one thing that did not exist last year
For the past year I have been building a machine.
Not a search and not a spreadsheet. A super
intelligent machine that reads every home for sale
in the Lower Mainland and prices each one against
rents that were actually signed, with real fees,
real taxes and the real cost of buying and
selling. It sets aside what it cannot price
honestly, ranks the rest, and brings the cream to
the top. Right now the cream is thin, and I would
rather hand you a short list I trust than a long
one I do not.
It is the first tool of its kind here, built for
people buying to invest, and I am opening it to a
small first group.
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