Home sales
5,057
▼ 2.1% year over year
New listings
12,075
▼ 14.1% year over year
Average price
$993,410
▼ 2.7% year over year
Active listings
24,482
▼ 11.3% year over year
The August numbers came out this week, and there's something in them that mostly got missed.
The headline was that sales dipped and August ended a five month run of improving numbers. Fair enough. But look at what fell and by how much. Sales barely moved. Supply fell off a cliff. That tells you the pullback came from sellers, not buyers, and those two things lead to very different places.
Here's the rest of what's in the data, and what I think it means if you're weighing a move over the next 6 to 12 months.
1.Sellers are the ones who disappeared
Year over year decline, August 2026 against August 2025. Longer bar means a bigger drop.
Buyers still showed up. Sellers didn't. And when there's less to choose from, listings stop competing with each other, which is usually what puts a floor under prices. TRREB is saying something similar. If inventory keeps tightening, some buyers could end up choosing between waiting for more certainty and moving before prices firm up.
2.Condos took the biggest hit, and it isn't close
MLS® Home Price Index benchmark, year over year change. Benchmark price shown at right.
Individual home type All types combined, for reference
Most of the correction is landing in the condo market. At $531,200, the benchmark is about $40,000 cheaper than it was a year ago. So if freehold felt out of reach before, the gap between a condo and a townhouse is a lot more workable right now. Detached is the opposite story, by the way. It's holding up better than anything else out there, and detached sales were actually up 0.5% from last year.
3.Here's how the year has actually played out
Monthly GTA sales. Average price shown alongside for reference.
| Month | Sales | Average price |
|---|---|---|
| Jan | 3,044 | $968,468 |
| Feb | 3,834 | $1,007,392 |
| Mar | 4,992 | $1,015,058 |
| Apr | 5,918 | $1,051,810 |
| May | 6,550 | $1,069,621 |
| Jun | 6,745 | $1,059,183 |
| Jul | 5,980 | $1,003,763 |
| Aug | 5,057 | $993,410 |
Some of August's dip is just seasonal, since the market cools off every summer. What made people notice is that it broke a five month run of improvement. Zoom out though and the year is holding up fine. We're at 42,120 sales so far, at an average of $1,027,505.
4.This isn't really a million dollar market
Share of the 5,057 GTA sales in August, broken out by price band.
Under $600K $600K to $899K $900K to $1.24M $1.25M and up
We all hear about the million dollar average, but 65% of what actually sold in August closed under $1M, and more than one in five closed under $600K. There's a lot more going on in the entry level price bands than that headline number lets on.
Where things stand around the region
August 2026 sales and prices by region.
| Region | Sales | Average price | Median price |
|---|---|---|---|
| City of Toronto | 1,767 | $979,684 | $770,000 |
| York Region | 971 | $1,179,938 | $1,041,800 |
| Peel Region | 940 | $908,415 | $850,000 |
| Durham Region | 602 | $819,569 | $766,000 |
| Halton Region | 571 | $1,110,436 | $957,000 |
Across the GTA, homes sold for about 97% of asking and took 35 days to sell, which is two days longer than last August.
So what do you do with all this?
If you're buying
Prices are still soft and the 5 year fixed is sitting around 6.09%. But inventory is shrinking quickly, so that window where you get both choice and room to negotiate is narrower than it was back in the spring.
If you're selling
You're up against 11.3% fewer active listings than last August, and new supply is down 14.1%. Well priced homes are still getting 97% of ask. The average property sat for 51 days though, so pricing is still what decides how this goes.
If you're investing or looking at pre construction
A $531,200 resale condo benchmark shifts the pre construction math quite a bit. Most of the real difference lives in the deposit structure, occupancy fees and closing costs, which is exactly what I walk through in the video below.