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.)