Fault line

Poor YVR.

The nation’s second-largest but most self-absorbed housing market tanked last month. You can’t blame the auto sector. There isn’t one. You can’t fault a populist, pugilistic, Trump-baiting government since BC is run by snowflake socialists. Both Toronto and Vancouver have ridiculous vacancy taxes, foreign buyer levies and escalating property fees. Both cities have massive foreign-born populations – 46% of all Toronto residents and 42% of the people in Vancouver were not hatched in Canada.

But lately it’s Vancouver and the LM that are falling off the real estate cliff faster than Toronto and the GTA.

January was a complete crap-out on the left coast. Sales collapsed 30% from the month before and the previous year. Listings are piling up. Days-on-market stats are exploding. Yes, prices are falling – but a process that seems only to have started in Van, while the decline has been sharper, faster, deeper in TO.

The new listings situation last month tells the tale. In Vancouver they soared – 5,157 more properties suddenly materialized – taking the total of available digs in the Metro region to more than 16,000. Compare that to Torontopolis, a market more than twice as large, where fewer than 18,000 are up for grabs.

Yes, YVR is drowning in unsold real estate. Maybe unsaleable homes, unless prices dip further. The average property in Toronto is now – for the first time since Adele was a thing – under $1 million. In Van it sits at $1.1 million. In both cities, there are enough houses with FOR SALE signs planted on the lawn (or the balcony) to satisfy buyer demand for the next six months.

What a dramatic change from three years ago when buyers were ripping through available houses in a week or two.

“Demand plummeted in several markets—particularly Vancouver and Fraser Valley,” says RBC economist Rachel Battaglia, “while Edmonton, Winnipeg and Saskatoon posted notably weak results. Toronto and Montreal continued to soften as well. Calgary and Regina were among the few outliers to see an increase in buying activity. Inventories, however, continued climbing higher across most regions—taking a toll on prices. Several markets posted largest year-over-year price declines in years.”

Yeah, everywhere. It’s a buyer’s market.

And look. Mortgage rates have come down, too.

Three-year money is now available at just over 3.5%, while borrowers can lock into five-security at 3.99% with a little shopping-around or sweet-talking TNL@TB. It’s welcome news for the million-or-so households who are facing loan renewals in 2026, after scoring five years of stupid-low monthly pandemic payments.

And what do soaring inventory levels and crappy sales mean?

Of course, seller anguish. The measurement of that is the length of time it takes to endure showings, deal with realtors, keep the dog hair vacuumed every day, the shower cleaned and the nose prints wiped off the glass door. This is summarized on realtor websites, and it’s useful to know that the metric is reset every time a house is relisted because of a price reduction or just to garner more attention.

DOM means ‘days on market’ and records the time since the last listing of that property, not the first one. The total length of time a place is for sale might be recorded as CDOM (cumulative days on market) or PDOM (property days on market). In Vancouver lately this is clocking in at almost 100, while in Toronto it sits at 67.

What does this situation – plumper prices and languishing listings – tell us about the LM, as opposed to the GTA?

That buyer urgency in the west coast metropolis is gone, gone. Incomes are lower in Vancouver than Toronto and prices are higher. The inventory of unsold homes is proportionately massive, and market momentum has largely evaporated. The legacy of uninhabitable shacks in decent hoods selling for $3 million, of rapacious realtors renting helicopters so offshore buyers could point below and mutter, “I’ll take that one…” and a misguided provincial government layering on massive real estate taxes lives still.

If there is a massive price tremor yet to be felt anywhere in this land, it will be here.

Brace yourself.

About the picture: “Here is a submission for the daily blog,” write Derek and Michelle.  “This is Moose. He was found abandoned on the streets of Red Deer and in poor health. We adopted him and have grown an incredible bond. The team at Turner Investments has done an incredible job of setting our family up financially so we can focus our efforts on things that actually matter. Thank you for the daily blog. The dog pictures, humour, and timely reminders on how lucky we are to be Canadians are much needed to balance out the noisy world.”

To be in touch or send a picture of your beast, email to ‘garth@garth.ca’.

Source: https://www.greaterfool.ca/2026/02/08/fault-line/