Photo: Canadian Mortgage Professional
If you needed proof that the GTA housing market's fall from grace is now official, Switzerland just delivered it. The 2026 UBS Global Real Estate Bubble Index ranks Toronto dead last among the 23 world cities it tracks — inflation-adjusted home prices here fell nearly 10% over the past year, the steepest drop in the entire sample. For a city UBS called the world's strongest housing market from 2014 to 2022, when real prices doubled, it's the kind of whiplash that leaves marks: Toronto is now roughly 30% below its peak. UBS points to three culprits — higher interest rates, Ottawa's foreign-buyer ban, and a glut of supply. (Money.ca)
Here's the part that matters for anyone actually buying or selling here: UBS no longer calls Toronto overvalued. Both Toronto and Vancouver now score in the "moderate" bubble-risk band — the same as Los Angeles, Sydney and Singapore — which means the speculative froth is largely gone. But don't mistake that for a rebound signal. TRREB's data shows the slide continuing: the GTA composite benchmark fell 4.5% year over year in August, and the average selling price of $993,410 remains a world away from the $1,334,544 all-property peak of February 2022. That's a $341,000 gap.
And then there's the clock. New data from Toronto real estate platform Wahi, reported last week, shows GTA homes are now taking three to four times as long to sell as they did at the Q1 2022 peak — and condos, the segment that carried the last boom, are taking the hardest hit. Condos averaged 36 days to find a buyer in Q2 2026, up from about 32 days a year earlier. At the height of the frenzy, the same units changed hands in under two weeks.
"Back in 2022, the average condo was getting snapped up in well under two weeks."
— Ryan McLaughlin, economist, Wahi
McLaughlin doesn't sugarcoat why the timeline stretched out:
"However, since then, there has been a mass exodus of investors, federal reductions in immigration targets, and an ongoing trade war. The upshot is inventory levels remain near historic highs, giving condo buyers lots of room to negotiate pricing and conditions."
— Ryan McLaughlin, economist, Wahi
It's not just condos, either. Every property type has gotten slower: semis drifted from 18 to 20 days between Q2 2025 and Q2 2026, detached homes from roughly 23 to 25, townhouses ticking up to about 24. Compare that with the spring of 2022, when detached homes sold in nine days and semis in about a week. The Wahi numbers show days on market rising year over year in every successive quarter — a streak that's run through at least mid-2026. For anyone listing this fall, a long wait isn't the exception anymore. It's the baseline. (Canadian Mortgage Professional)
So where does that leave the two sides of the table? If you're buying to live in the place, the window is about as open as it's been in a decade. UBS estimates a skilled service worker needs less than five years of income to buy a 650-square-foot unit near the city centre — the lowest ratio of any city it studies, against 11 years in London and 15 in Hong Kong. Marco Pedri, a broker with Shoreline Realty, told CTV News that for people buying a home to live in, "this may be an opportunity to actually secure something." Sellers, on the other hand, need to price like it's 2026, not 2022 — listing with the frenzy years' expectations just means joining the swelling ranks of stale inventory.
Two dates worth circling. The Bank of Canada announces its next rate decision on October 28, after holding at 2.25% in September while warning that financial conditions are tightening through rising bond yields. And the federal foreign-buyer ban is set to expire on January 1, 2027, unless Ottawa extends it — a genuine wildcard that could move the needle if it's lifted. Between now and then, the market's shape is the one these two datasets describe: prices nearer to fair than they've been in years, homes moving at a crawl, and buyers — the patient ones — holding every card in the negotiation.
That's the market as it stands — we'll be back tomorrow evening with the next round of headlines.
Compiled by the HomesFound team from the reporting linked above.
