Zillow's $212.5 Million Settlement Is Really a Story About How Hard It Is to Price a House

Zillow, the American real estate marketplace, said last Wednesday that it will pay $212.5 million (USD) to settle a class action lawsuit brought by its own shareholders over Zillow Offers, the home-flipping business it shut down in November 2021.  Zillow Offers never operated in Canada, but I am writing about it because it is the clearest recent example of what happens when a very large, well-funded company decides it can run a local business from a head office, and because the way it failed says something useful about how any house gets priced.

Zillow App Icon

What Zillow Offers was

Zillow started the program in Phoenix in 2018, using the data behind its Zestimate to make cash offers, close within weeks, tidy the homes up and resell them.  Sellers got certainty, investors were told that more housing data than anyone else could be turned into a margin on volume, and by the summer of 2021 Zillow was buying thousands of homes a month across the Sun Belt.

In early November 2021 word got out that most of the homes in Zillow's inventory were worth less than the company had paid and that it was trying to sell about 7,000 of them.  Within days Zillow announced it was closing the division, writing down $304 million on homes bought that summer and letting go a quarter of its staff.  The stock fell 32 per cent in two days, shareholders sued in Seattle that same month, and after the Supreme Court declined to hear Zillow's appeal in early October the company settled, admitting no wrongdoing, with insurance covering about $48 million and a judge still to approve the deal.

Zillow was not undone by a crash or by rates, because American prices were still rising when it folded.  It was undone by being wrong on each house by a few percent, with the best-funded pricing model in the industry behind it.  The company's own explanation at the time was "unpredictability in forecasting home prices," which is a careful way of saying that a model built in Seattle could not tell which house on a Phoenix street was worth more than its neighbour.

“unpredictability in forecasting home prices”

— Zillow

Carvana ran the same play with cars

Carvana, the American online used-car retailer, spent 2021 buying cars near the top of the market on the theory that a national algorithm and a large balance sheet could replace the local dealer, and when prices turned it was holding inventory it had overpaid for and about $5.7 billion in debt.  The stock fell roughly 99 per cent from its August 2021 peak to under $4 by December 2022, about 4,000 people lost their jobs, and the company came within sight of bankruptcy before its bondholders agreed in 2023 to forgive more than a billion dollars of principal.  Carvana survived, and joined the S&P 500 last December, so the comparison is not that these companies disappear, its that the model is challenging.  The pattern is that the first thing they get wrong is the price of what they are buying, and the people paying for the mistake aren’t the ones who made it.

A used car is close to a commodity, with a wholesale auction price published every week, and if a national algorithm can misjudge a three-year-old Honda Civic badly enough to nearly sink a company, a house with a ravine lot and a finished basement of uncertain vintage is a far harder problem.

Why it never came to Canada

Properly, the Toronto company that promised to buy your house if it did not sell, pulled back from that guarantee when our market turned in 2022, and the large American iBuyers never crossed the border.  The GTA has nothing like the thousands of near-identical houses that make Phoenix or Atlanta easy to model, and our offer-night way of selling does not translate.  Another version will arrive the next time money is cheap, and the Zillow file is worth rereading when it does.  A guaranteed price is only a gift if it sits above what the open market would pay, and the company offering it is betting that it does not.

Pricing a house here

Nearly every buyer I meet now arrives with an estimate from HouseSigma or Zoocasa, and so do I.  They are good at the middle of the bell curve, where a townhouse in Wismer has forty near-identical neighbours.  Where they struggle is where the money changes hands: the 60-foot lots of Markham Village, the backsplit on a ravine in Thornhill, the Unionville house with an addition that may or may not have a permit.  The model does not know that the neighbour's sale dragging the estimate down had a wet basement on inspection, or that the one pulling it up went to the family next door who wanted the lot, and those details are what cost Zillow a few per cent on thousands of homes.

For a seller, the estimate on your phone is where the conversation starts.  What closed on your street in the last sixty days, and why each one closed where it did, is where the price comes from, and that is most of what I do before I put a number on a listing.  For a buyer, the same tools that call a house overpriced by four percent, were wrong by about that much on a few thousand homes in Phoenix.  An automated-estimate will get you to the front door. What the house is worth comes from someone who knows the street, has stood inside the homes that sold, and can read where this market is heading, which is the part Zillow spent $212.5 million learning about the hard way.

The Bank of Canada Raises Its Rate to 2.5 Per Cent, and the Waiting-for-Cuts Plan Is Over

The Bank of Canada raised its policy rate this morning by a quarter point, to 2.5%.  It is the first increase since July 2023 - ending seven straight holds at 2.25 %  Many people in the bond market felt it coming, as well as a Reuters poll of economists last week. Those who carry a variable-rate mortgage will see it on your next statement.

The sentence in the statement that matters most is this one: "There could be a need to increase the policy rate further, but given uncertainties, we will proceed carefully." The Bank is not promising another hike but it has stopped talking about cuts altogether, and Governor Macklem said that risks to inflation had increased and there was "less scope for monetary accommodation." Anyone who spent 2026 waiting for lower rates before renewing, buying, or selling now has to rethink.

Why the Bank moved when core inflation is near 2 per cent

The reason is primarily the cost of oil.  Crude has been trading around US $110 a barrel because of the war in the Middle East, against the US$75 the Bank assumed in its July forecast, and gasoline was up 27.8 per cent year over year in September (Statistics Canada).  Headline inflation came in at 3.1%, above the Bank's 1 to 3 per cent range, and it has sat near 3% since April.  Strip out gasoline and inflation was 2.2%, with the core measures close to 2, which is the case made by economists who wanted another hold.  The Bank is looking six to twelve months out, and the longer energy stays expensive the more likely trucking firms, grocers and landlords pass the cost along.  The new Monetary Policy Report has inflation reaching about 3.5 per cent by year-end, averaging 3% through 2027, and only getting back to 2 per cent by the middle of 2028. 

What a quarter point costs on a variable mortgage

Prime at the big banks is 4.45% at the time of writing, but I would expect it to go to 4.70%, most likely effective Thursday.  On a $600,000 adjustable-rate mortgage at prime minus 0.80 with 25 years left, the payment goes from about $3,043 a month to about $3,124, an increase of roughly $80.  Nobody sells a house over $80 a month, but stacked on top of a renewal from a 2021 rate, though, it is the kind of number that makes a family in Markham decide the four-bedroom move is a 2028 conversation rather than a 2027 one.  If your variable mortgage has a fixed payment, more of each payment now goes to interest and less to principal.

If you are on a fixed rate, today changed nothing on your statement and very little on the rate sheet either.  Five-year fixed mortgages are priced off the five-year Government of Canada bond, and that yield rose about 20 basis points in the month leading into this decision.  Many lenders repriced weeks ago.  The question for fixed-rate borrowers is the next six weeks: the Bank meets again on December 9, and the bond market will spend November deciding whether "proceed carefully" means one more move or none.

What it does to our market

I would push back on the gloom a little - TRREB's September numbers had GTA sales down 9% from a year earlier, but new listings were down 14.4% and active listings down 9.3%, and prices rose about 1.3% from August even while sitting below last year's levels.  York Region finished September with roughly five months of inventory, which is a buyer's market on paper and a balanced one on the streets I work, where a well-kept house in Unionville still draws three or four showings its first weekend while the tired ones sit.  A quarter point does not change that split.

What it changes is the story buyers have been telling themselves since spring, that waiting costs nothing because rates would be lower by the time they were ready.  The Bank has now said otherwise.  Over the years that kind of message has pulled as many fence-sitters into the market as out of it, because waiting suddenly has a price.  The Bank's own report expects housing to stay weak into next year, and nationally I would not argue.  Locally, scarce listings and soft sales add up to a stalemate rather than a slide, and a stalemate tends to break toward whichever side blinks first.  For sellers that argues for pricing to the last sixty days of sales and not to 2022, because the buyers who remain are well qualified and in no hurry.

The one thing I would do today is call your lender if you have a renewal anywhere in the next twelve months and ask for a rate hold.  It costs nothing and buys up to 120 days of protection in a market where the five-year bond can move 20 points in a month.  A pre-approval is stress-tested at a rate well above what you actually pay, so nobody who qualified last week stopped qualifying this morning.  What changed is the monthly payment, and that number is worth seeing on paper before deciding anything.  I will be reading the December 9 decision as closely as anyone, and if you would like to go through your own numbers before then, you know where to find me.

Ottawa's New Heat Pump Rebate: What It Pays, Who Qualifies, and Why the Timing Matters

If your furnace gives out this winter, the federal government would now like to help pay for the replacement, on the condition that the replacement is a heat pump.  That is the short version of what Prime Minister Carney announced in Sherbrooke on October 8: a $2 billion national heat pump rebate, worth up to $10,000 for households earning below their province's median after-tax income and $2,000 for everyone else (CTV News and BNN Bloomberg, October 8, 2026).  Three clients have asked me about it in the past two weeks, two of them with furnaces old enough to vote, so here is what I have been able to pin down and where I think the judgment calls sit.

Modern Residential Heat Pump Installation

The program is built around the moment a heating system fails or is close to failing, though officials have said a breakdown is not a strict requirement.  There is no energy audit, before or after.  You apply online before you buy, get an answer on eligibility and the dollar amount within a day, have the unit installed, upload the receipts and get paid by direct deposit within about five days.  Ottawa expects it to reach up to 820,000 households over eight years.  The portal is supposed to open in early 2027, and the government has said it is looking at ways to make installs done before then eligible as well.  The date being reported for that is November 1 of this year, with the full rules and the list of eligible units due at the same time, but I would treat that as unconfirmed until it is on a government page (Government of Canada backgrounder, October 8, 2026; UrbanToronto, October 20, 2026).

The rebate stacks with provincial money.  Ontario's Home Renovation Savings Program currently pays up to $7,500 toward a cold-climate air-source heat pump, depending on the size installed, and up to $12,000 for a ground-source system, with no energy assessment required for a single upgrade (saveonenergy.ca).  So a household below the median line could see $17,500 in rebates against the installed cost, and a household above it could see $9,500.  Those are real numbers on a job that usually runs well into five figures once ductwork and electrical are counted.

Now the part the announcement skips, which matters more in Markham than in Sherbrooke.  The government's own savings estimate, about $1,400 a year, is for homes heating with oil or electric baseboards.  Almost every house I list between Unionville and Stouffville heats with Enbridge gas, and in Ontario the gap between what you pay for a kilowatt hour and what you pay for a cubic metre of gas is narrow enough that a heat pump replacing a gas furnace saves far less, and in a cold stretch can cost more to run.  Most of the installs I hear about locally keep the gas furnace as a backup for the coldest weeks and let the heat pump carry the shoulder seasons, which also gives you air conditioning in July from the same equipment.  Have your installer model your actual bills before you commit to pulling the gas line, and find out who is pulling the permit, because the City of Markham's own guidance says a change in your furnace's fuel source needs one.

Typical Natural Gas Furnace, Residential

What does any of this do to the value of your house?  Less than people hope and more than nothing.  I have never seen a buyer pay a premium for a furnace, but over the years I have watched a twenty-year-old one cost a seller real money on offer night, because the inspector writes "at end of service life" on page two and the buyer's agent prices it at a full replacement.  A new heat pump system with the paperwork in a folder removes that conversation.  It also answers a question I now get from younger buyers in Cornell and Wismer about what the house costs to run each month, which nobody asked me five years ago.

So, three situations.  If your furnace is limping and you are not selling, nurse it through the next few weeks if you safely can, get two quotes now so you are ready, and plan the install for after the rules are published, when you will know whether the retroactive date is real.  If you are selling this winter and the furnace is old, do not replace it to sell; price the house with the furnace as it is, disclose the age, and let the buyer collect the rebates in their own name next year, which is a better pitch than it sounds once you explain it.  And if you are buying a house with a tired furnace, those rebates belong to you, so do not let the seller's agent talk you out of adjusting for it.

I will update this post when the rules land on November 1, or whenever they actually land.

Markham Votes This Week, and the Fourplex Fight Is the Housing Question on the Ballot

Fourteen.  That is the number that has stayed with me through the whole fourplex argument.  Between the fall of 2022, when the province allowed three units on most residential lots, and last September, Markham's planning department received fourteen applications from homeowners who wanted to build the maximum on one property.  Four were approved.  In a city of roughly 375,000 people, that is the demand behind the "shantytown" speeches at the public meetings, and it is worth keeping in mind this week, with online voting already open and the final voting day set for Sunday, October 26.

The road to this ballot started in March 2024, when Markham signed a Housing Accelerator Fund agreement with Ottawa worth $58.8 million, tied to 1,640 fast-tracked homes over three years.  One of the seven commitments in the city's action plan was to permit four units as-of-right on lots zoned for detached, semi-detached and townhouse homes.  Since the province already allowed three, the change amounted to one more unit per lot, each with its own entrance, kitchen and bathroom (Government of Canada news release, March 12, 2024).

The bylaw then took most of a year to reach a vote.  Public meetings in September and October 2025 drew the familiar worries about parking, sewers and the look of the street, along with the mayor's remark that the city has "enough issues with pool cabanas and gazebos."  The item came off the October agenda, was deferred in November and again in December, and skipped January.  Council finally passed it 7 to 6 in late February 2026.  In March, Mayor Scarpitti used his strong mayor powers to revoke it, citing pressure on city services, transportation and parking, and noting that Markham already has more than 220,000 units in the planning pipeline.  In April the federal housing minister announced Markham would lose $7.36 million of its expected funding for missing the commitment, and said Ottawa expects the city to propose how it will make that up.

So where does that leave someone standing in the driveway of a sixty-foot lot on Wootten Way or a bungalow on an older Thornhill street?  Exactly where they were.  Three units remain legal across Ontario on most residential lots, so a basement apartment plus a garden suite behind a detached house is still within reach in Markham without a rezoning.  What the veto removed was the fourth unit, and judging by those fourteen applications, the people who would have built it could fit in my office.  I have walked a lot of wide lots with sellers over the years, and I tell all of them the same thing: the value in that lot comes from what a buyer believes they will be allowed to do with it, and a mayor who overrules his own council over one extra door tells buyers something about how the next application will be received.

That is the part this election decides.  A 7 to 6 vote means a single seat changes the arithmetic, and several seats are open this time.  Ward 3 and Ward 6 have no incumbent running, Deputy Mayor Michael Chan's regional seat is open, and eleven people are competing for the four regional councillor positions (hello markham, October 15, 2026).  I am not going to tell you who to vote for.  I have clients on both sides of the fourplex question, and some of the most thoughtful people I know in Unionville are in the camp that wanted the veto.  What I will say is that the question deserves a plain answer from anyone asking for your vote, and most of the campaign material in my mailbox talks about traffic and "responsible growth" without saying what either one means for the lot next door.

If a candidate knocks this week, I would ask them this: would you vote to bring four units as-of-right back, and if not, how do you plan to recover the $7.36 million and protect the rest of the $58.8 million?  Their answer, either way, tells you how your street is likely to look in ten years, and whether Ottawa helps pay for the roads and pipes that everyone at those public meetings said they were worried about.

A word on the day-to-day as well, because the election will come and go and the listings will not.  The province's three-unit rule is not going anywhere, buyers of deep lots have been paying a premium for the garden suite option for two years now, and the pre-2024 zoning shown on a lot of older listings is stale either way, something I wrote about in August.  If you are selling a property with a deep lot in Markham Village, Thornhill or on the older streets of Unionville, the honest pitch is three units, documented and drawn, rather than a fourth that may or may not return after October 26.

Online voting runs through October 26, in-person voting is October 23 to 26, and your voter information letter should have arrived earlier this month (City of Markham).  Vote with your house in mind.

The Foreign Buyer Ban Expires January 1

On January 1, 2027, the federal ban on non-Canadians buying homes here is scheduled to end, and with about eleven weeks to go nobody in Ottawa will say what happens next.  Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne was asked about it last Wednesday and would say only that the government is weighing every option.  Sellers have started asking me if offshore buyers are about to come back, and buyers have started asking if they should hurry.  My answer to both is no, at least in Ontario, and the reason is a provincial tax that most of the coverage leaves out.

What the ban covers, and what it never did

The Prohibition on the Purchase of Residential Property by Non-Canadians Act took effect on January 1, 2023, as a two-year measure, and in February 2024 it was extended to the start of 2027.  It stops people who are neither citizens nor permanent residents, and the companies they control, from buying houses, townhouses and condo units in and around Canadian cities.  The exemptions are wider than most people realize.  Someone on a work permit with at least 183 days left on it can buy one home.  So can some international students, refugees, and anyone buying with a Canadian spouse.  Vacant land, buildings with four or more units and property outside urban areas were never covered.  The penalty for breaking the rule is a fine of up to $10,000 and a possible court-ordered sale (CMHC; Department of Finance Canada).

Did it accomplish anything? That is an open argument.  The best data we have suggest foreign owners held no more than five per cent of homes in any major Canadian market in 2020, before the ban existed.  CIBC's Benjamin Tal told Bloomberg the policy "doesn't make any sense" and should be allowed to lapse, on the theory that offshore money helps get new buildings financed.  Mike Moffatt at the University of Ottawa made a similar case while conceding that the ban is popular, and that popularity is what makes this awkward for the government.  Housing Minister Gregor Robertson has said this year was being used to study how other countries handle it, Australia in particular, where foreign buyers may purchase newly built homes and are kept out of existing ones.

Ontario's 25 per cent tax stays either way

The piece that matters on our side of the provincial line is the Non-Resident Speculation Tax.  Since October 25, 2022, Ontario has charged 25% on homes bought anywhere in the province by foreign nationals and foreign corporations.  That tax is provincial law, and it stays put no matter what Ottawa decides.  Toronto added its own 10 per cent on top at the start of 2025, though that one stops at Steeles.

So picture the ban vanishing on New Year's Day and an overseas buyer taking an interest in a $1.6 million house in Unionville.  Before land transfer tax, legal fees or a single piece of furniture, that buyer owes the province $400,000.  Very few people will pay that to own a resale home, and the ones who would were mostly finding a legal route in already, through a work permit or a spouse.

I have been selling in Markham long enough to remember when offshore buyers were a real presence on offer night, and I understand why the question makes people uneasy on both sides.  That was a market with no speculation tax at all until 2017, then one at 15 per cent, and prices rising fast enough to absorb it.  Today the tax is 25 per cent and the national benchmark price is roughly 20 per cent below its peak. - The arithmetic that drew that money here has changed.

Where an expiry or an Australian-style rewrite could matter is pre-construction.  Builders need a good share of units sold before a lender will finance a tower, and the condo projects planned around Markham Centre and along Highway 7, like projects across the GTA, have had a hard time getting there.  If Ottawa opens new construction to foreign buyers, some stalled buildings may find their footing, and Queen's Park would then face pressure to soften its own tax for new builds.  That is a story for 2027 and later, and it would add supply without putting anyone new at the table for a resale house this spring.

If you are selling this winter, do not hold your listing back for a wave of overseas buyers in January, because the provincial tax will keep that wave small.  If you are buying, do not let a headline about the ban ending rush you into an offer you would not otherwise make.  Were it up to me, I would let non-residents buy new construction and keep resale homes for the people who live here, which is roughly where I expect Ottawa to land.  They have to announce something before the calendar turns, and I will update this post when they do.

Toronto Is Giving Away Fourplex and Sixplex Blueprints

Toronto spent a decade arguing about whether small apartment buildings belong on residential streets.  Now it is handing out the drawings.

The city has released a set of made-in-Toronto pre-approved designs for fourplexes and sixplexes, free for any property owner to download and use as the starting point for a building permit application.  The plans already meet the Ontario Building Code and Toronto's zoning rules, and they extend a catalogue the city began with its garden and laneway suite designs.  Maia Tustonic covered the launch in the Toronto Star on October 7.

Some context for readers who have not followed this file closely.  Fourplexes have been legal on residential lots across Toronto since May 2023, and fiveplexes and sixplexes have been allowed in parts of the city without special permissions since last year.  What was missing was an affordable way to get from a legal right to a permit-ready drawing.  The new designs come in versions for narrow and wide lots, with options for bicycle parking, waste storage and features like heat pumps and solar, and builders can choose between brick and siding to manage the budget.  Kamal Gogna, the city's chief building official, says planning staff studied the most common Toronto lot sizes so the plans would fit real streets rather than ideal ones.  There is one catch worth underlining: a free plan is not a stamped drawing.  An owner still needs a qualified designer to adapt the design to their particular lot before the city will look at a permit application.

So what is the giveaway actually worth? Ron Sheinin of Modcity, a builder who does this work for a living, told the Star that designing a fourplex from scratch can run up to $60,000 in architectural fees and roughly another $20,000 for engineering, and the drawings alone take a month or two.  Start from a proven plan and a good chunk of that time and money comes back, which matters most to exactly the people this program is aimed at: the owner or small investor attempting a first multiplex, for whom the design stage is the most intimidating part of the project.

The skeptics have a point too.  Sean Galbraith, who runs an urban planning firm, argues that design fees were never what stopped multiplexes from being built; land and construction costs are the real wall, and they dwarf the architect's bill.  Toronto's lots also vary enormously in width, depth and grade, and a stock plan only helps if your lot happens to suit it.  "It's nice to have, but it's not going to move the needle much," he told the Star.

My own reading sits between the two.  Taking $80,000 of soft costs and two months of carrying time out of a small project is real money; on a tight pro forma it can be the difference between proceeding and passing.  But the more important thing here is the direction of travel.  Ten years ago, Canadian cities treated this housing form as something to be fought at committee.  Today the country's largest city is publishing the blueprints itself, and Ottawa put out its own catalogue of standardized home designs last year.  Governments have gone from permitting gentle density to actively packaging it, and I do not see that shift reversing.

These particular drawings stop at the Toronto border, but the thinking behind them does not.  Every Ontario municipality, Markham included, has had to allow up to three units on most residential lots since the province changed the rules in 2022, and the pressure to go further keeps building.  I notice it in a practical way: when I walk a wide lot in Markham Village or old Thornhill with a seller now, the conversation is as much about what the land could hold as about the house sitting on it.  Small builders are running that arithmetic quietly on ordinary streets, and on certain lots they are the strongest buyers in the field.

If you own a wide or deep lot on an older street, some part of your property's value now lives in what could be built there, and that part is growing.  Knowing that number before the sign goes up is the difference between pricing a house and pricing a property.  I have been doing more of this lot arithmetic this fall than ever, and if you suspect your property is one of these, it is a short conversation that can change the asking price.

Check out Toronto’s Multiplex plans for yourself here.

(Source: "City releases new fourplex, sixplex designs," Maia Tustonic, Toronto Star, October 7, 2026.)

GTA Home Sales Fell 9% in September, but Listings Fell Faster - and That Changes the Math

The September report from the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board is out, and the headline writers went straight for the sales number: 5,040 homes traded across the GTA last month, down nine per cent from a year ago. 

The Toronto Star framed it as economic uncertainty scaring off buyers and sellers, and that is true as far as it goes.  But the number that will do more to shape the next six months sits one line further down.  New listings dropped more than 14 per cent, to 16,500.  When supply falls faster than demand, a market tightens, and TRREB's Jason Mercer made the same point in the Star's coverage: the pullback on both sides has left the market somewhat tighter, even as it shrank.  A nine per cent sales decline and a tightening market sound like they cannot both be true.  In September, they were.

The rest of the report reads calmer than the headline.  The average selling price came in at $1.006 million, down about five per cent from last September and roughly 25 per cent below the February 2022 peak.  There were 26,131 active listings at month end, which works out to about four and a half months of inventory at the current pace of sales.  Homes sold for an average of 98 per cent of asking and took an average of 34 days to sell.  None of that describes a frozen market.  It describes a balanced one, populated by careful people.

What changed since the summer is worth understanding, because it explains where this goes next.  In August, sales were down only two per cent from a year earlier, and the talk was of shrinking supply setting up renewed competition among buyers.  Mercer's explanation for the sharper September drop is that the mood shifted: optimism about a trade deal faded as summer ended, inflation worries grew, and longer-term borrowing costs have risen with them.  I would add his own simpler point, which is that falling listings suppress sales all by themselves.  As he put it, "You can't buy what's not there." A buyer hunting for a particular kind of home on a particular handful of streets has fewer doors to knock on than a year ago, and some of September's missing sales are exactly that.

The softness is also unevenly distributed, and this is where I would slow down and read carefully.  Detached homes averaged $1.29 million, down about five per cent.  Condo apartments took the hardest hit, averaging just over $605,000, down about eight per cent, after two years in which completed projects and investor-owned units piled inventory onto that segment.  Townhouse sales fell about 13 per cent.  For a first-time buyer, the condo market now offers more negotiating room than I can recall seeing in a long while, in the very segment that is usually the entry point to ownership.

If you are thinking of selling, the practical reading of that 14 per cent drop in new listings is that much of your competition stayed home this fall.  A properly prepared home, priced to the last sixty to ninety days of truly comparable sales, is operating in a thinner field than it would have faced a year ago.  The discipline still matters, though: 98 per cent of asking and 34 days on market are the statistics of buyers who do their homework and quietly pass on wishful pricing.  That holds on a crescent in Unionville just as it does downtown.

For buyers, the arithmetic runs the other way.  TRREB continues to see substantial pent-up demand, households waiting for confidence in their jobs and in borrowing costs before they act.  Prices sit a quarter below the peak, selection is still reasonable at four and a half months, and sellers are meeting the market.  Mercer's caution is the one I would take seriously: if listings keep declining faster than sales, the choice buyers have been enjoying shrinks, competition returns in some neighbourhoods first, and the year-over-year price declines start to narrow heading into 2027.  The Bank of Canada's October 28 decision, which I wrote about here a couple of weeks ago, is the near-term swing factor, and a surprise in either direction will move psychology more than payment math.

So the market in the headline is softer than the one in the report.  Sales fell because confidence wobbled and because inventory quietly thinned, prices gave back five per cent, and the segments pulled further apart.  If your plans for the next year touch either side of that market, the numbers behind the headline are worth twenty minutes of your time, and I am glad to go through them with you with your own street and your own house in the conversation instead of the GTA average.

(Source: Toronto Regional Real Estate Board September 2026 figures, as reported by Anastasia Blosser, Toronto Star, October 6, 2026.)

Inside Swan Lake Village, the Markham Community Where Downsizers Land

Every few months I find myself at a kitchen table in Unionville or Markham Village with clients in their late sixties, a pot of coffee going cold, and the same question hanging over the paperwork: if we sell this house, where would we even go? The four-bedroom served its purpose.  The garden has become a chore.  The stairs are a conversation.  And the answer, more often than people expect, turns out to be a place most Markham residents have driven past for years without ever seeing in: Swan Lake Village.

Swan Lake sits off Ninth Line at Sixteenth Avenue, wrapped around the kettle lake that gives it its name, and it is one of the very few gated communities anywhere in Markham.  The gatehouse is staffed around the clock.  Behind it are 649 homes, built in phases from 1997, when the first resident moved in on January 27 of that year, through to the final homes around 2010 (Swan Lake Village residents' site, swanlakevillage.ca).  It was designed from the first drawing as an adult-lifestyle community: homes are capped at two permanent occupants, pets are welcome within limits, and everything about the place, from the pace of the paths to the programming calendar, assumes the kids have moved out.

The variety inside the gates surprises people.  There are detached bungalows and bungalofts, two-storey townhomes, and four low-rise apartment buildings on The Boardwalk Way overlooking the water, with suites from about 1,100 to 2,000 square feet and some of the larger homes reaching 2,700.  That range matters, because downsizing is rarely one move.  I have known residents who went from a century home near Main Street to a bungaloft, and years later from the bungaloft to the Boardwalk, without leaving the gates or the friends they had made.

Those friends are the real product.  The Swan Club is a 16,000 square foot centre with an indoor pool, a gym, billiards and an art room; three satellite clubhouses add outdoor pools, tennis and pickleball; and the residents run more than thirty clubs of their own, from bridge to tai chi to line dancing (swanlakevillage.ca).  When I bring a hesitant client through, I do not start with a floor plan.  We walk the boardwalk, we poke our heads into whatever the art room is doing that afternoon, and somewhere on that walk the question quietly changes from why would we to which one.

Now the broker's portion, because this is still a real estate decision and the numbers deserve daylight.  Listings in Swan Lake currently run from the high $800,000s to about $1.7 million, with most homes trading between roughly $900,000 and $1.5 million (Oct 2026).  Selling a detached home in Unionville or Markham Village will usually fund the move with money left over, though less than people assume once land transfer tax, moving costs and any updating are counted.  Budget honestly for the monthly fees as well.  They cover water, cable and internet, building insurance, exterior maintenance, the gatehouse and the amenities, and residents who use what they pay for consider them money well spent - but they are a real monthly number, and I want clients to see it beside their retirement income before they fall in love with a sunroom.

I will also tell you who should not buy here, because that conversation saves grief later.  If your plan involves rental income, a grandchild staying for a school year, or a home office with staff coming and going, the rules will fight you.  And resale behaves differently inside a gate.  The pool of buyers is narrower than for a freehold bungalow on an ordinary street, so a well-priced home sells steadily to a motivated audience while an overpriced one can sit for months.  If it were my listing, I would price it tight to the last few sales of the same home style and let the community sell itself from there.

If the kitchen-table question in your house lately has been where would we even go, Swan Lake deserves an unhurried afternoon.  I am happy to walk it with you, floor plans in one hand and no particular agenda in the other.

New Home Sales in the GTA Tripled in August

Something happened in the new construction market this summer that deserves more attention than it got.  In August, 692 new single-family homes sold across the GTA.  A year earlier, that number was 215.  Sales have more than tripled from last year's historic low, and August came in 47 per cent above the ten-year average, according to figures prepared by Altus Group for BILD, the Building Industry and Land Development Association, and reported in the Toronto Star on September 22.

The HST Rebate Is the Reason

Numbers like that don't move on their own.  The push is coming from the HST rebate on new homes that the federal and provincial governments brought in this past April.  It's a one-year program, and it was designed as a lifeline for a building industry that had spent two years stuck between a backlog of unsold supply and a stubborn price gap between new homes and resale.  BILD reports five straight months of rising low-rise sales since the rebate arrived, and year-to-date single-family sales now sit at 5,550 - more than double last year's record low, and roughly in line with the ten-year average.

To understand why it's working, remember where new construction was sitting.  From the 2022 peak to the end of last year, new single-family prices had already fallen about 25 per cent, and even then almost nothing was moving.  The rebate closed enough of the remaining gap to get buyers signing again.  The benchmark price for a new single-family home was $1.25 million in August, down 14.6 per cent from a year earlier - and that's the gross price, before the rebate comes off.

Builders are responding in a particular way: townhomes.  Across the GTA, townhomes are taking a much larger share of single-family sales than the historical pattern would suggest, because builders are pricing them to make the most of the rebate.  We see it around here as well.  The townhome sites in Cornell and up through Victoria Square are exactly the kind of product this program was built to move.

Condos are a different story.  There were 215 new condo sales in the GTA in August.  That's double a year ago, but still 78 per cent below the ten-year average, and a long way from the 3,149 units that sold in August of 2021.  The rebate hasn't done much for condos because the program's rules around construction start and completion dates make it hard for most projects to qualify.  If you've been reading about trouble in the condo market, this is another chapter of the same book.

And before anyone declares a boom, one more number matters.  At the current pace of sales, it would take 38.5 months to clear everything builders have on the market.  A healthy market clears in nine to twelve.  Buyers still hold the stronger hand, and they will for a while yet.

So what do I take from all of this?  If you looked at new construction two or three years ago and walked away because the sticker made no sense next to resale, the arithmetic has changed.  Prices are down meaningfully from the peak, the rebate comes off the top, builders are motivated, and there is more finished and nearly finished inventory to choose from than I can remember seeing in a long time in this business.  The rebate runs for one year, which puts a quiet clock on the whole thing.

It matters on the selling side too.  Every sharply priced new townhome is competition for a resale one, and pricing a listing this fall without accounting for that is leaving the job half done.

If a new build has been somewhere in the back of your mind, this is a sensible season to look again.  Send me a note about any project you're curious about and we'll go through the real numbers together, rebate and all.

The Garages Are Out Back on Purpose - A Realtor's Look at Cornell

Typical Laneway Garage (and coach house) Cornell

Show a buyer from Toronto three houses in Cornell and somewhere around the second one they ask where the garages went.  The answer is that they are out back, off a rear lane, exactly where the neighbourhood's planners put them in 1994.  Cornell is the rare suburb that was designed as an argument, and after a lot of years showing homes there I can tell you the argument mostly worked.  If you are weighing a purchase or a sale in the east end of Markham, it helps to understand what this neighbourhood was trying to do, because it still shapes prices, showings and the way a home here needs to be marketed.

A suburb built to prove a point

In the early 1990s, Markham hired Duany Plater-Zyberk, the Miami planning firm behind Seaside, Florida, to lay out a community that pushed back against the standard subdivision.  The plan they delivered in 1994 called for a tight grid of streets instead of curving crescents, houses pulled close to the sidewalk with real front porches, and garages moved to rear lanes (City of Markham; the planning history is well documented if you ever want to go down that rabbit hole).  Building started in 1997, and the neighbourhood has been filling in ever since, from the original streets around Bur Oak Avenue out to the newer Cornell Rouge phases near the Little Rouge Creek.  Roughly speaking, it runs from 16th Avenue down to Highway 407, between Ninth Line and the Donald Cousens Parkway.

The porches are not decoration.  On the older streets people actually sit on them, and a street where the front of every house is a porch rather than a double garage door photographs better and feels different to walk.  Kids can bike on a connected grid instead of a dead-end crescent.  And the practical anchors are unusually strong for a suburb: Markham Stouffville Hospital sits on Church Street at the neighbourhood's edge, the Cornell Community Centre holds the library and the pool, and the Cornell bus terminal runs Viva and GO routes plus an express bus to Finch station.  The buyer pool reflects all of that - young families, hospital staff who want a short trip to a shift, downsizers who want a house without a driveway to shovel, and a steady trickle of Toronto buyers who recognize the streetscape from neighbourhoods they could no longer afford.

What to look at before you offer

Buying here has a few wrinkles the listing sheet will not mention.  Walk the lane as well as the street.  Lanes are shared space; some are beautifully kept and some are tired, and your garage lives on one, so ask how snow clearing works back there and who looks after it.  Some blocks carry live-work zoning and a few homes have coach-house space over the garage, which can be a real bonus, but have your lawyer confirm what the zoning actually permits before you count on the income.  And notice that Cornell is townhouse-heavy compared with Berczy or Wismer, which is part of why the entry price sits lower than in those school-driven neighbourhoods to the west.  You are trading lot size for streetscape and services, and it is a fine trade as long as you make it with your eyes open.

Selling a Cornell home is its own craft

If it were my listing, the first photo would be the porch and the tree-lined street, never the lane, and the showing route would bring buyers in through the front door, because the front is the argument.  Price against Cornell sales, too.  An agent who prices a laneway townhome off Wismer comparables will miss, because the built forms are different enough that the comparables have to come from inside the neighbourhood.  For the wider backdrop, my September 9 post on the August TRREB numbers covers where Markham sits this fall (TRREB Market Watch, August 2026).

One more thing worth watching if you own here.  South Cornell has been in redevelopment planning since 2022, and the proposals include mixed-use buildings up to 13 storeys (City of Markham development applications).  Some owners will read that as the main street Cornell was always promised, others as density landing close to home.  It will come up at the door this election season, and it is exactly the kind of zoning question worth putting to your ward candidates in October.

Cornell was a bet that people would pay for streets built around porches instead of parking, and the resale market has spent nearly three decades proving the bet right more often than wrong.  If you are weighing it against Berczy, Wismer or one of the newer phases out east, I am glad to walk a few of those lanes with you.  It is a neighbourhood that makes more sense on foot than on paper.