Toronto’s property market — long one of the most competitive and overvalued in not just the country, but the entire world — has completely hit a wall under the pressures of heightened interest rates and costs of living, tariffs, and economic tumult.
Amid paltry home-buying activity and a constant flow of new listings, real estate prices have, naturally, sunk, with the GTA now serving as one of only three major hubs where the cost of the average house, condo or townhome has fallen over the last year.
According to real estate listing site Wahi, the Canadian market at large is “holding steady,” all things considered, with the exception of Toronto, Vancouver, and Hamilton — all markets that are known for being red-hot.
“The Canadian housing market entered a holding pattern this August as the RPS-Wahi House Price Index was once again flat relative to the same month a year ago, although the pace of condo depreciation on an annual basis did slow slightly,” the firm’s experts said in a new market snapshot, published on Monday.
“That said, condo inventory levels remain high in Toronto and Vancouver, and we would expect that needs to change before any meaningful turnaround in pricing trends.”
Year-over-year change in the cost of the average home in hubs nationwide. Graph courtesy of Wahi.
Indeed, realtors and others have been remarking on the bonkers number of homes, specifically condos, that have been coming up for sale in the GTA each month, pushing the total number of listings in the region to never-before-seen highs in the tens of thousands.
Meanwhile, far fewer homes are changing hands, pulling prices down.
Though Wahi notes that its nationwide home price index didn’t budge much last month, the aforementioned exceptions, including Toronto, are noteworthy. While somewhere like Quebec City saw the price of the typical dwelling surge by 12 per cent between August 2024 and August 2025, Toronto’s dropped by four per cent.
Though an objectively small figure, based on average prices right now, that equates to somewhere north of $43,000 of savings on the same house last month versus a year ago. And, according to authorities like the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB), the cost of a home has actually dropped even more than that in the year (5.2 per cent, per last month’s TRREB Market Watch Report).
Also released on Monday were new numbers from the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA), which painted the same story of Toronto, stating that “unlike in recent months, when gains were led overwhelmingly by the GTA, sales in the GTA were down in August, which was more than offset by higher sales elsewhere.”
According to the association’s data, home sales increased by 1.1 per cent nationally month-over-month and 1.9 per cent year-over-year, even with Toronto dragging stats down, with prices creeping down 0.1 per cent from July to August, and 3.4 per cent from last August to last month.
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