The slowdown in sales and high inventory in 2025 have eased home prices, said the region's real estate board
Metro Vancouver’s tepid housing market recorded its lowest number of home sales in two decades, according to the board that represents the region’s real estate agents.
Economic uncertainty, combined with a market with ultraexpensive homes that are no longer appealing to speculators, are some of the reasons behind the downward trend, real estate observers said.
But while conditions seem favourable right now for prospective homebuyers — with lower prices, lower borrowing costs and plenty of inventory — it remains too early to tell whether they will come off the sidelines.
The Greater Vancouver Realtors announced Monday that they recorded about 23,800 sales in 2025, a 10.4 per cent drop from sales in 2024 and nearly 25 per cent below the 10-year historical average.
“This one was one for the history books,” said Greater Vancouver Realtors’ chief economist Andrew Lis in a news release, describing a combination of the lowest home sales in two decades and the highest number of listings since the mid-1990s.
Lis told Postmedia News that in other times when home sales have slowed, there’s usually been some fairly obvious economic reason, but not so this time.
“If I look at something like 2008, it was a financial crisis at that point in time. This time around, the factors were a little less obvious in some ways,” he said. “It depends on how you evaluate the impact, or the perceived impact, of the trade tensions with the United States, which seems to be the story of the year of what was largely keeping people on the fence from purchasing.
“Interestingly, while sales weren’t as high as we would have expected for the year, there was no shortage of sellers coming to the market. There was a very active sell side.”
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He added that the Metro home sales slowdown in 2025 wasn’t accompanied by a “wildly rising unemployment rate as a result of the tariff shock or anything like that. What we’ve seen in the market … it seems at a surface level. It’s mostly been a psychological impact.”
Lis said the slowdown in the real estate market isn’t uniform across Canada and was seen mostly in larger regions in Ontario and B.C.
“I was trying to figure out why and the best I can tell from the data that I was able to look at, it seems prices do have something to do with it. It seems that in markets across Canada that saw a very rapid price growth over the last 10 years or so, those are all the markets that seem to be having the slower sales.”
He said in other markets where prices have gone up at a slower, steady pace over the last 10 years, they did relatively well in terms of sales in 2025, running above their 10-year averages.
“One way of reading this is saying that there’s a psychological element of people concerned about the possibility that prices could fall in these larger markets that have seen very rapid price growth.”
While prices in Metro fell five per cent across the board in December 2025, Lis pointed out that over the past few months they have been steadier, and changing in a more “sideways” direction rather than rising or falling. If this continues, it may signal a bottom to some buyers and allow confidence to pick up and translate into higher sales.
Lis is building a model to predict where the number of home sales might land in 2026 and will have more forecasts in late January. A large part of forming that picture will require getting to the spring months and seeing if buyers step back into the market, he said.
“At a certain point, I do expect that the pressure from the buy side to release. There are people who have been waiting to make a move for all kinds of life reasons: jobs, births, deaths, downsizing, upsizing. When a market has stalled out, like we saw in 2025, with the buy side not being as active as we normally see, a lot of those people who delayed decisions eventually are going to choose to make them.”
Vancouver real estate agent Roman Silan said that the market is more driven by buyers with wealth rather than income and that there is currently a whole segment of buyers missing from the market: the speculators.
“I don’t want to call it a synthetic scenario of (price) appreciation, but let’s just use that word for argument’s sake. The speculators create this demand.”
He said he works with a lot of first-time buyers and everybody’s apprehensive, asking, “What kind of return can I expect on this?”
“And I tell everybody the same thing. ‘Nobody has that crystal ball.’ ”
Lis said he expects sales in 2026 to come back toward a bit more of a “normal range from where we ended in 2025, around 24,000. I would expect 26,000, 27,000, 28,000 maybe. 30,000 would be a pretty good year.”
In terms of listings in 2025, 65,335 properties were listed on MLS, an 8.2 per cent increase compared with 2024 and 13 per cent higher than the 10-year annual average. This number was the highest total of listings to market on record since the mid-1990s, eclipsing the previous record high in 2008 by a little over 1,000 listings, said Lis.
Listings are off to a brisk start in 2026 with 12,550 homes currently listed for sale, about 35 per cent higher than the 10-year seasonal average.
The Metro market shifted very slightly toward lower price points in 2025, according to Joannah Connolly, head of content at HouseSigma, an agency that provides market information.
While every price category saw a drop in total sales, the number of sales of homes under $500,000 moved slightly higher, from 2,474 in 2024 to 2,582 in 2025.
Of the total number of homes sold in 2025, 55 per cent were under $1 million and 88 per cent were under $2 million. One-in-nine sales, or 11.5 per cent, were of homes valued above $2 million.