The Quietest Summer in Years

If you felt like there was nothing to look at this summer, the data backs you up. GTA REALTORS® reported 5,995 home sales in July 2026 — down just 0.9% from a year earlier, essentially flat. Demand didn't disappear. What disappeared was supply.

New listings fell 17.8% year-over-year to 14,484, and active listings dropped 12.1% to 26,098. That's not a seasonal dip — it's the sharpest annual listings decline of the year so far, and it happened while buyers kept showing up in roughly the same numbers they did last summer.

There's a real-world backdrop here too. TRREB's own leadership has pointed to buyers holding off for more clarity on tariffs, inflation, and borrowing costs before committing — the kind of macro noise that doesn't show up in a sales chart but absolutely shapes who shows up to an open house.

The Number That Actually Matters

Sales barely moving while listings collapse is the textbook setup for a tightening market — and TRREB's sales-to-new-listings ratio is the cleanest way to see it. Under about 40% is generally read as buyer-favoured territory; above 60% tips toward sellers. July's ratio moved decisively toward the middle of that range for the first time in a long stretch, up from where it sat both a month and a year earlier.

Months of supply told the same story, easing from where it sat in spring to a tighter reading in July — still technically a buyer's market on paper, but closing fast. TRREB's own Chief Information Officer, Jason Mercer, has pointed to this shift as a sign the market may be sitting at the bottom of its current cycle.

One City, Two Very Different Markets

Here's the part that gets lost when people talk about "the Toronto market" as one thing. It isn't. Freehold housing and condo apartments are currently moving in opposite directions, and because of how Toronto's housing stock is distributed, that split maps loosely onto geography — condo apartments are heavily concentrated downtown, while semis, townhouses, and detached homes dominate midtown and east-end neighbourhoods like Leaside, Davisville, and Riverdale.

Inside the City of Toronto specifically, July's average prices by type: detached homes at $1,547,928 (691 sales), semi-detached at $1,122,326 (233 sales), freehold townhouses at $867,635 (249 sales), and condo apartments at $672,807 (1,054 sales). The gap between the top and bottom of that list — over $875,000 — is the widest it's been in a while, and it's not just a price story.

Freehold supply is genuinely scarce right now, which is a big part of why new listings fell so sharply overall. Condo apartments are the opposite problem: GTA-wide, new condo listings hit roughly 4,190 in July against about 1,564 condo sales — nearly 2.7 new listings for every unit that sold, on top of over 8,300 active condo listings already sitting on the market. That's real, structural oversupply, not a slow month.

And within freehold itself, it's not uniform either — semi-detached homes posted the weakest combination of price and sales of any major segment this July, down 7.3% year-over-year on price and 6.5% on volume, while detached homes held sales almost perfectly flat and freehold townhouses showed the most consistent pricing of any format in the region.

What Happens After Labour Day

Every year, a chunk of sellers who could have listed in July or August wait until after Labour Day instead — back-to-school, vacations, and simple habit push the decision down the calendar. This year, that pent-up group is unusually large, because so few freehold owners listed all summer.

That sets up a real possibility: a genuine surge in freehold new listings through September and October, right as the sales-to-listings ratio was already climbing toward balanced territory. If that surge shows up on schedule, it could be the best selection freehold buyers have seen all year — but likely a short window, not a new normal, since demand is already absorbing supply faster than it was twelve months ago.

Condos are a different calculation entirely. With that much active and incoming inventory already sitting unsold, a Labour Day bump in condo listings doesn't meaningfully change the buyer's position — leverage there looks likely to persist well into the fall regardless of what happens with freehold supply.