Based on July 2026 Market Data

The Greater Vancouver REALTORS release leads with home sales losing momentum. Residential sales across Metro Vancouver totalled 2,061 in July, down 9.8 per cent from July 2025 and 18.6 per cent below the ten year seasonal average.

That reads as a demand problem.

But new listings in July came in at 4,991, down 11.5 per cent year over year, with apartment listings down nearly 17 per cent. New listings essentially matched the ten year seasonal average of 4,992, while sales ran far below it.

Demand stepped back. Supply stepped back harder. That distinction changes what the rest of the data means.

Metro Vancouver Overview

Total active listings sit at 16,476, down 4 per cent from July 2025 and still 26.8 per cent above the ten year average.

The overall sales to active listings ratio is 13 per cent, breaking down to 10.5 per cent for detached, 15.8 per cent for attached and 14 per cent for apartments.

GVR's own guidance is that downward price pressure tends to appear when the ratio sits below 12 per cent for a sustained period, and upward pressure above 20 per cent. Detached is inside the softening zone. Condos and townhomes sit just above it.

The composite benchmark price is $1,088,800, down 6.2 per cent year over year and 0.9 per cent from June. Apartment sales totalled 952, down 17.8 per cent year over year, with a benchmark of $688,000.

Vancouver Westside

Westside condos and townhomes came in at a 14 per cent sales ratio, down from 17 per cent in June.

The area average understates what happened underneath it. Kitsilano condos fell from a 42 per cent sales ratio in June to 20 per cent in July. Fairview fell from 45 per cent to 25 per cent. Those were the two strongest Westside condo pockets sixty days earlier.

False Creek moved the other direction, rising from 12 per cent to 23 per cent.

Westside detached sits at a 10 per cent sales ratio, selling roughly 3 per cent below list. Days on market rose from 19 in June to 29 in July. Point Grey is at 6 per cent with 103 active listings, Shaughnessy at 3 per cent with 80, South Granville at 6 per cent with 77.

Vancouver Eastside

Eastside condos and townhomes ran a 19 per cent sales ratio, up from 18 per cent in June.

The improvement came from the supply side rather than the demand side. Inventory fell 11 per cent from 767 to 684 while sales moved only from 139 to 132.

Meanwhile the sale to list price ratio dropped from 97 per cent to 93 per cent. Homes are selling at roughly 7 per cent below asking.

Eastside detached moved from a 15 per cent ratio in June to 10 per cent in July, but days on market remained at 16 with homes selling within 2 per cent of asking.

Downtown Vancouver

Downtown attached inventory has declined for five consecutive months: 1,033 in May, 975 in June, 917 in July. Sales over the same period ran 120, 143 and 134. The sales ratio held at 15 per cent in both June and July.

Homes are selling at 99 per cent of list price with 30 days on market.

By community, Coal Harbour and Yaletown are both at 18 per cent, the Downtown core at 14 per cent and the West End at 11 per cent.

Across all of Vancouver West, only two condo areas avoided a year over year benchmark decline: Coal Harbour, up 0.4 per cent, and False Creek, up 0.2 per cent. Yaletown condos are down 10.5 per cent and the West End is down 9.7 per cent over the same period.

Downtown three bedroom units are running an 8 per cent sales ratio with 102 listings against 8 sales.

Other Metro Vancouver Areas

North Vancouver condos and townhomes cooled from 20 per cent in June to 16 per cent in July. North Van detached moved from 23 per cent to 17 per cent.

West Vancouver detached is the softest segment in the report at 7 per cent, with homes selling 9 per cent below list price on average.

Richmond attached sits at 12 per cent and detached at 10 per cent. Tsawwassen detached is at 16 per cent and attached at 12 per cent. Ladner detached is at 11 per cent and attached at 15 per cent.

Interest Rates: What Is Actually Moving Fixed Mortgage Costs

The Bank of Canada held its policy rate at 2.25 per cent on July 15, 2026, its sixth consecutive hold. The next scheduled announcement is September 2, 2026.

Despite that stability, fixed mortgage rates have been drifting upward. Fixed rates are priced off Government of Canada bond yields rather than the overnight rate. The five year yield has been sitting just above 3 per cent and rose again in early August as tensions around the Strait of Hormuz pushed oil and global yields higher.

The US Federal Reserve held its benchmark rate on July 29, 2026, with three of twelve voting members dissenting in favour of an increase. Elevated US Treasury yields tend to pull Canadian yields with them.

The practical outcome is that the best five year fixed rates have moved back above 4 per cent while the best variable rates sit closer to 3.5 per cent.

This is a variable to watch rather than a forecast. Anyone timing a decision around rates should track the five year Government of Canada bond yield.

What This Means If You Are Buying

Negotiating room exists but is not evenly distributed. The deepest buyer's markets in this report are Westside detached above $3.5 million, West Vancouver, Point Grey, Shaughnessy and South Granville.

Downtown is the exception. Five consecutive months of falling inventory against steady sales means the assumption that more listings will always appear deserves testing.

Securing a rate hold is prudent given the bond market pressure described above.

What This Means If You Are Selling

The first price remains the most consequential decision.

The contrast between Eastside listings selling at 7 per cent below asking and Downtown listings selling at 1 per cent below asking is largely a pricing story rather than a market story.

Owners of Downtown one and two bedroom units are in one of the tighter supply positions in Metro Vancouver. Owners of Downtown three bedrooms, or Westside properties above $3 million, should price for the buyer pool that currently exists.

Where I Land

The July headline says momentum died. The data says sellers withdrew faster than buyers did.

Those are different markets requiring different strategies, and the difference only becomes visible at the neighbourhood level.

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Watch: Vancouver Duplexes, Mistakes That Cost Buyers Real Money

A duplex isn't just a smaller detached home. It's a shared structure, a shared decision-making process, and in Vancouver, usually a strata, whether it feels like one or not.

In this video I walk through the mistakes that turn a good duplex purchase into a slow-motion headache: skipping the inspection because "it's new," not checking who you're actually buying beside, and misreading the ownership structure until it's too late to matter.

Not fear. Not drama. Just the patterns I've seen play out more than once.

Data sources: Greater Vancouver REALTORS® for the Metro Vancouver overview, SnapStats for area and neighbourhood breakdowns, and the Bank of Canada for policy-rate context.

JULY 2026 Market Update

What the headline says. What actually moved. And the one question to ask before you react.

Every time a headline like "Vancouver market picks up" drops, I get the same text within a day or two.

"Should I list now?"

Almost nobody asks what's happening underneath the headline. They just react to it.

So let's do the opposite.

The Metro Picture: Everyone Bought, Nobody Paid More

Greater Vancouver just posted its strongest month of sales in over a year.

• 2,390 sales in June, up 9.6% year over year

• Detached up almost 14%. Attached up over 11%. Condos up 6%.

That breadth is the real story. For two years, one property type would move while the others sat still. This time all three moved together, which GVR's chief economist flagged as a rare event and a possible early sign of demand returning.

But here's the part almost nobody reads far enough to find.

Prices barely moved.

The composite benchmark sits at just over $1,099,100, down 6% year over year and down one tenth of one percent from May. Basically flat.

Why? Because inventory is still sitting roughly 30% above the ten-year seasonal average. There are enough homes on the market to absorb the extra buyers without anyone having to pay up.

More people bought. Nobody paid more to do it.

That's a market waking up, not a market on fire.

One thing worth watching: new listings in June were actually down 6% from last year. Demand ticking up while fresh supply slows down is the first combination in a while that could genuinely start shrinking inventory. Too early to call. But it's on the watch list.

The Rate Question: What You're Actually Waiting On

The Bank of Canada held its policy rate at 2.25% on July 15th, its sixth hold in a row.

The reason matters. Oil prices spiked earlier this year on the Middle East conflict. That's a supply shock, which pushes inflation up even while it slows growth down, and that boxes the Bank in. It can't cut into rising inflation without risking making inflation worse.

The good news buried in that: oil has come off its spring peak, and June inflation eased to 2.8% from 3.2%. The pressure is releasing, slowly.

So if you're waiting for rates to drop before you buy, understand what you're waiting on. Not Vancouver. A barrel of oil half a world away. A real variable, but not one I'd build a purchase timeline around.

The Condo Buyback Program, and Why It Skips Your Market

You've likely heard about the government plan to buy unsold new condos. Here's the honest version.

It's a joint federal and provincial program, announced in June, to acquire more than 2,200 completed but unsold units and convert them to affordable housing. The backdrop is real: CMHC reported nearly 4,400 finished, unsold condo units across Metro Vancouver as of May, up 76% in a single year.

But the Premier said plainly the program won't work in the City of Vancouver, because prices here are too high for it to pencil out. The target is the Fraser Valley, the Okanagan, and Vancouver Island.

If you own or buy a condo in Vancouver proper, Downtown, the Westside, the Eastside, this program is not aimed at your market. Developers have pushed back publicly, the financing is still being worked out, and it could still shift. When it firms up, I'll do a full breakdown. For now, for your market, it's noise.

Westside: One Label, Opposite Planets

"Westside condos" hides more than it tells you.

• Fairview 45%. Kitsilano 42%. Genuine seller's markets, on real volume.

• Cambie 7%. Oakridge 5%. South Cambie 4%. South Granville 5%. Buyer's markets, a few minutes away.

Same label. Opposite planets. If you own in Kitsilano, you're in a strong spot. If you own in South Cambie, the data says something very different.

And Westside detached is a buyer's market in its own right: benchmark just over $3 million, down more than 9% year over year, sales ratio at 11%. The high end, Shaughnessy and South Granville, is where the softness concentrates. If your budget reaches there, it's one of the more negotiable environments in years.

Eastside: Where the Average Lies

Eastside looks calm on the surface, 18% attached and 15% detached. Balanced.

Underneath: Main 30%. Knight 27%. Hastings and Mount Pleasant around 24%. Grandview Woodland 21%.

The average tells you the Eastside is fine. The neighbourhood number tells you where it's actually working.

Downtown: The 13% That Isn't What You Think

Here's the number making the rounds. Downtown attached median sale price went from $787,500 in May to $890,000 in June. That's a 13% jump.

It isn't appreciation.

Days on market didn't fall. It rose, from 22 to 28 days, a 27% increase. In a market that's genuinely heating up, homes sell faster, not slower.

What actually happened: the mix of what sold shifted toward larger two-bedroom units, and more sales came out of Yaletown (a 20% sales ratio, the strongest read in the core) versus the Downtown-proper submarket at just 10%. Bigger units in a pricier pocket pull the average up, even when no individual condo is worth a dollar more than it was a month ago.

The price of what sold went up. The value of what you own did not.

That's not appreciation. That's arithmetic.

The Market Nobody's Watching

While everyone stares at Downtown, the real heat is in North Vancouver.

Detached sales ratio 23%. Days on market fell from 15 to 10. Median price up 5% in a single month to just over $2 million. Lynn Valley at 29%, Deep Cove at 24%. Quietly the tightest market in the whole package.

Everywhere else held roughly steady. West Vancouver is still a buyer's market (8% detached, 32 days). Richmond is balanced. Ladner and Tsawwassen are choppy month to month on small samples, so read the trend, not the swing.

The Move-Up Window Quietly Opening

For anyone thinking about trading up: on the Westside, condo prices are down about 5.5% year over year while detached is down more than 9%. When the pricier tier falls faster, the gap between them compresses, and moving up gets mathematically easier, even though the calendar didn't change.

We don't call the bottom. We watch the spread. Right now, on the Westside, it's compressing.

The Playbook

If you're buying: Cambie, Oakridge, South Cambie, South Granville, and softer Westside detached pockets have real room to negotiate. And don't let "Downtown condos are up 13%" talk you out of a fair offer.

If you're selling: North Vancouver detached and the strong Westside condo pockets (Fairview, Kitsilano) reward discipline fastest right now. Everywhere else, the metro uptick is real but not yet strong enough to rescue a bad price.

The One Thing to Take Away

The metro headline is good news, and it's real. But it's demand returning to a market that still has the inventory to absorb it, not a market where you can suddenly ask for more.

And any eye-catching number deserves one question before you react to it: what actually moved, the price or the mix? This month, it was the mix.

Don't let the loudest number in the room set your expectations. Ask what's underneath it first.

Want a straight read on your specific building, neighbourhood, or price range?

👉🏼Book a strategy call

Prefer to review your numbers first? Reply and I'll send an updated equity report and map out your options.

No pressure. Just strategy before the noise.

Data sources: Greater Vancouver REALTORS (GVR) for the Metro overview. SnapStats for neighbourhood-level reads. Bank of Canada for the July 15 rate decision. CMHC for unsold-inventory figures.

If you're weighing a Vancouver presale condo against a resale unit right now, the math behind that decision has changed — and not in a small way. For about a decade, buying presale was a genuine strategy. Today, for most buyers, it isn't the obvious win it used to be. I know because I made the call myself, and I paid for the lesson.

Here's what actually changed, and how I'd think it through if I were deciding today.

The presale pitch worked — for a decade

The pitch was simple, and for years it was true. You buy early. You lock today's price. The building takes three, four, five years to finish. While you wait, the market climbs — and you walk into a unit worth more than you paid.

Between 2015 and 2021, in a market rising 10, 15, even 20 percent a year, that worked. Locking in a price and waiting was a real strategy that made real money for real people.

But the whole thing rested on one condition: prices keep going up while you wait. That was never guaranteed. It just felt like it was.

The part most buyers never separated out

Here's what gets missed. In a presale, the appreciation wasn't a bonus. It was your payment — the compensation you received in exchange for taking on four real risks most buyers never fully price.

When you buy a presale, you're not just buying a condo. You're buying four risks stacked on top of it:

• Construction risk — the building can come in late, or different from the renderings. Materials get swapped. Views get blocked by towers that didn't exist when you signed.

• Financing risk — you qualify today, but you close in three or four years, under conditions nobody can predict.

• Timeline risk — your life stays on hold while a building finishes on someone else's schedule.

• Market risk — if prices fall between signing and completion, you reach the end of a multi-year wait holding a unit worth less than you paid.

For years, appreciation covered all four. That was the deal.

The number the sales centre won't give you

Market risk deserves a closer look, because it's designed to be hard to see.

You pass a sales centre. A few weeks later a sign goes up: "60% sold." Something in you relaxes. The building's moving. You're right on time.

But that number leaves out the two things that actually matter. It doesn't tell you over what period. And it doesn't tell you 60 percent of what — the whole building, or just the units released in one early phase priced to step up later.

The number that would actually measure your risk is how close the project is to the pre-sales it needs to secure construction financing. Lenders generally want to see a significant share of units pre-sold — often in the range of 60 to 70 percent — before releasing that financing. That live figure sits with the developer's management, not the front desk. I work in this industry, and even I can't walk in and get a straight answer without knowing someone on the inside.

That's not a conspiracy. It's marketing doing exactly what it's built to do. But it means the number you can see is the reassuring one, and the number that would tell you your real risk is the one nobody's handing out.

What happened to me

When I bought my presale in 2022, the developer gave me roughly a hundred thousand dollars in decorator allowances and incentives. It felt like a tremendous deal — like I'd won before I'd even moved in. From the outside, you'd assume I was protected. A hundred grand in credits, how do you lose?

I sold it in 2025. I still lost money.

Not because the incentives weren't real — they were. It's that the market underneath the deal moved, and when that happens, a hundred thousand in allowances doesn't save you. It just changes the number you lose by.

That's the part I want you to sit with. The incentives weren't the deal. They were the distraction from the deal. They had me looking at the credit instead of the one question that actually decided the outcome: was the market going to pay me to take this risk, or charge me for it?

I'm not sharing this to complain. I made the call and I own it. I'm sharing it because I paid for a lesson a lot of buyers are learning right now.

Watch the full breakdown

Watch the full video on YouTube

The exit ramp that closed

It's not just my situation. The benchmark apartment price in Metro Vancouver is down close to 8 percent from a year ago (April 2026 data). For buyers who signed at peak in 2021 and 2022, the compensation didn't just shrink — it went negative.

And the escape hatch they were counting on is gone. There used to be an active assignment market: if your plans changed, you could sell your contract before completion, usually to an investor planning to flip. That market existed because investors believed prices would keep rising. The investors left. When nobody's buying to flip, there's nobody to assign to — not at a profit, sometimes not at all.

Peak-price buyers, completing into a lower market, with the exit they were counting on closed. That's not a price dip. That's a trap.

The real question isn't presale or resale

Here's the whole thing in one idea. The question was never "presale or resale?"

The real question is: am I being paid to take this risk, or am I paying extra for it?

For a decade, presale paid you. You took on the risk, and appreciation was your reward. In 2026, for most buyers, that's flipped. You carry the same four risks — but instead of being paid, you're often paying a premium for them, while a finished resale unit sits a few blocks away, cheaper, that you can walk through today.

Early used to mean ahead. Right now, for most buyers, early means exposed.

The supporting data is unusually clear. Metro Vancouver had zero concrete condo launches in Q1 2026, down from 152 the year before — the new-supply pipeline at the top end has effectively shut down. At the same time, CMHC data shows 4,376 completed and unsold condo units across Metro Vancouver as of May 2026, up sharply year over year — units that are finished, standing, and unsold. And on the resale side, in many buildings a used unit now costs less than the brand-new one being sold next door. The premium presale used to command didn't just narrow. It flipped.

One more variable worth watching: the Bank of Canada's policy rate is 2.25 percent as of June 2026. If you sign a presale today, you qualify at completion, not at today's rate. I won't predict where rates go — but if you're running presale numbers, run them across a few different scenarios. That's the variable that can move the picture most.

So should you ever buy presale?

Yes — sometimes. Anyone who tells you it's always one answer is selling you something.

There's a real presale buyer, even now: long time horizon, strong cash position, genuinely wants new construction, looking in a pocket where resale inventory is thin, buying from a developer with a real delivery record — and, most importantly, able to absorb a worst case without it breaking them. If that's you, some of the incentives developers are offering right now can be genuine value.

But that's not most people. Most buyers I talk to can find a solid resale unit in a well-run building, available now, for less money and less risk — and get on with their life instead of waiting three years to find out whether the floor plan they picked on paper actually works for how they live.

Four things I'd check before deciding

These are the four things I wish I'd done more carefully in 2022:

1. Run the side-by-side honestly. Same neighbourhood, same bedroom count, similar size. What does resale cost today? What do you actually know about it? How soon can you move in? That comparison alone settles most of these decisions.

2. Get a real read on the project's financing position — from somewhere other than the sales centre, because that's not where that answer lives. The further a project sits from the threshold it needs to get built, the more delay and cancellation risk you're carrying. That's what your own representation is for.

3. Treat any discount as a risk premium, not a win. A big incentive tells you the developer needs buyers. It doesn't tell you what the market will be worth when you close. Price the risk, not the discount.

4. Know your exit before you need one. If the plan was to assign the contract if things changed, that ramp is closed right now. Go in clear-eyed about what happens if your situation shifts.

The bottom line

Don't ask which one is better in the abstract. Ask whether you're being paid to take this risk, or paying for it. Right now, for most buyers, the answer points toward resale.

If you're working through this for a specific situation — a presale you're considering, or figuring out what's actually available in resale in the same neighbourhood — that's exactly the kind of conversation I have with people. No pitch. Just a straight look at your options.

Book a call — happy to give you an honest read on which side of that risk question you're on.

Chris Car Personal Real Estate Corporation | TRG The Residential Group Realty | Vancouver condo and strata specialist