Home Sales Dip, New Listings Soar. Is the Sun Rising on GTA Real Estate?
Is the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) real estate market heating up? Are the good old days of home buying and selling in the GTA returning in 2026? There are many questions, but fewer answers grounded in solid facts.
A veteran realtor in Milton, Ontario, who has witnessed many cycles in the industry over his 40+ years in the business, summed it up with a single phrase while speaking to GTA Muslims Today: “In my line of business, understanding your clients—their context, hopes, aspirations, and red lines—is far more important than just reading industry reports. It’s the market forces you can’t see or quantify that tell the real story. I owe my longevity in this business to having learned what truly matters, the hard way.”
Well said, sir.
On November 5, news broke that nearly every realtor in Toronto or the GTA had been waiting for, in the hope that things would improve after the latest round of interest rate cuts. Three separate trends were converging, and according to traditional real estate wisdom, they should bode well for the industry:
1. The Bank of Canada has cut its interest rate by a combined 100 basis points (bps) since January 2025. Industry hopefuls believe this should motivate buyers to take action.
2. In October 2025, home prices across the GTA saw a 7.3% drop, bringing the average sale price of a detached home to approximately $1,355,506. The hope here is that a decline in home prices will lead to an influx of buyers.
3. New listings were up by 2.7% year-over-year in October 2025. This trend could indicate better negotiating power and more choices for buyers, suggesting a return to “market normalcy” in bold letters.
However, the only hiccup in this seemingly optimistic scenario is that the TRREB reported a 9.5% drop in home sales in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) for October compared to the same month in 2024.
Yet, staying true to their optimistic narrative, TRREB quickly claimed that home buyers “are benefiting from the current housing market conditions.” Seriously? Even with the 9.5% decline in sales compared to last year, which had already been facing substantial drops since 2020-21.
This anomaly encapsulates much of what is wrong with the way industry news is analysed and presented. It is often rooted more in hope than in fact and cherry-picked from figures that support a pre-existing narrative.
What could be causing the GTA home sales not to pick up?
With no clear trends to reference, the answer might range from the bruising consumer experiences of recent years, high prices deterring significant investments in real estate, a new generation of home buyers with differing preferences replacing older consumers, and outdated market calculations, to the confusion surrounding yesterday’s federal budget and Canada’s trade relationship with the USA and other global partners. These factors—and many others—are keeping potential buyers on the sidelines rather than actively participating in the market.
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