Quick answer: Not every part of the market has softened equally. Westside detached prices have pulled back roughly 13% from their 2024 peak and are close to where they stood in 2020, while Downtown condo prices, what most upsizers are actually selling, are down only about 5% from their 2022 peak. That gap between the two is smaller than it's been in years, which is worth knowing before you decide whether to wait or move.

If you'd rather watch than read, hit play below.

Is now a good time to upsize?

That's the question I keep getting asked, and my answer usually starts the same way. It depends on what you're actually upsizing into.

Right now, there isn't one Vancouver market. Condos, detached homes, and duplexes are telling three different stories. If you're reading the headlines and trying to make a decision off the aggregate number, you're reading the wrong number.

A few months back, I put out a video called Don't Buy a Duplex in Vancouver Until You Watch This. Not long after, someone reached out. They'd just had an offer accepted on a Westside duplex, and after watching the video, they had more questions than answers. They already had their own realtor on the deal, they just wanted a second opinion before removing subjects.

I won't tell you who this is, and I won't point at an address. But the numbers behind their situation are real, they're public record, and they say something worth understanding if you're weighing the same decision.

What the board data actually shows

Greater Vancouver Realtors put the benchmark price for a Vancouver Westside detached home at just over $3 million in July, down 7.5% from a year earlier. Active listings are down close to 14% year over year, and sales are actually up 8% over the same period, fewer homes coming to market, slightly more of them selling.

The sales to active ratio sits at roughly 9%. SnapStats classifies anything under 12% as buyer's market territory, so this segment is sitting comfortably inside that range.

It's not one flat story even within Westside detached. SnapStats has Kitsilano at a 37% sales ratio right now, a seller's market by any definition. Shaughnessy, same city, same segment, is sitting at 3%.

Looking at the SnapStats annual numbers for Westside detached going back to 2020: the median sale price that year was just over $3,043,000. It climbed from there, peaking in 2024 at $3,521,000. Year to date this year, it's sitting at $3,073,000, roughly 13% off the 2024 peak, and almost exactly where it stood six years ago. Not a small dip. A round trip.

The other side of the equation

Most people upsizing out of a condo aren't selling into this same softness. According to SnapStats, the median price for a Downtown Vancouver condo or townhome peaked in 2022 at just under $807,000. Year to date this year, it's sitting at $766,400, down about 5% off the peak.

Compare that to Westside detached, down roughly 13% off its own peak. Two completely different speeds. When the thing you're selling barely moves while the thing you're buying drops hard, the gap between them changes. That's what I call the spread, and right now, in this specific segment, it's compressed in a way we haven't seen in years.

A real example

The duplex the person above was buying into sat on a lot that used to be one property. A developer bought the lot, tore down what was there, and under the city's current zoning built two units side by side, each sold separately but tied to the same land, the same original cost, and often the same construction timeline.

Both units came to market within weeks of each other last spring, both listed at just over $2.5 million. The first unit sold this spring, after several listing attempts and close to a year on the market, closing at just under $1.9 million, roughly $700,000 off where it started.

The second unit is the one this buyer had the accepted offer on. That sale hasn't closed yet. It's accepted at just under $1.8 million, even lower than what its twin next door had already sold for. Same development, same builder, same product, and the second time around it took even longer and landed even lower. That's real price discovery, playing out twice in a row on the same block.

To be clear: this doesn't mean every Westside duplex is losing money, or that the whole market has gone soft. One deal is one deal. But it happened inside a broader pattern, and that pattern is backed by real board numbers, not a feeling.

Where this leaves you

Every move-up decision comes down to a gap, the gap between what your current place is worth and what the next one costs you. That gap isn't fixed. It moves.

Say your condo is worth roughly what it was two years ago, give or take a normal single-digit move. Say the detached or duplex product you want has pulled back double digits, in some cases closer to 30% off its peak. The gap between you just got smaller, not because your condo lost value, but because the other side came down to meet you.

None of this erases the size of the decision. Selling a place you've lived in for years, and betting on a bigger commitment, isn't small. But knowing where the numbers actually sit beats making that decision blind.

I don't predict bottoms, nobody credible does. But there's a pattern worth knowing: historically in Vancouver, the detached market has tended to correct before the rest of the market catches up, usually because it's the highest priced, most rate-sensitive corner of the market. Will it happen exactly that way again? I don't know. History doesn't repeat itself so much as it rhymes, and right now, this rhyme is hard to ignore.

This isn't about timing the bottom. It's about reading your position inside it.

If you've been sitting on the fence for a year or two, waiting for some signal that never quite arrives, this is worth treating as that signal. Not a guarantee. A reason to actually run your numbers instead of continuing to wait.

If you're considering a duplex purchase specifically, I put together a checklist covering exactly what to check before you remove subjects, from the neighbour conversation nobody wants to have to who's responsible for the roof if only one side leaks.

Download the Duplex Buyer's Checklist 
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No pressure. Just strategy before the noise.

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

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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