GTA Prices Fell Below $1 Million Again — What It Means Elsewhere in Ontario

What the August Numbers Actually Said

According to the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB), 5,057 homes changed hands across the Greater Toronto Area in August 2026, down 2.1% from a year earlier. The average selling price was $993,410, down 2.7% year over year — the second time this year the average has dipped under $1 million, after January marked the first time in five years.

The rest of the release describes a market with more homes for sale than buyers to take them. New listings came in at 12,075, down 14.1% from last year, while total active listings reached 24,482, up from a year earlier. Toronto real estate broker Cailey Heaps told The Canadian Press the summer was "slower than anticipated," attributing part of it to buyer fatigue after a long winter, and said she expects gradual, low-single-digit improvement into fall.

• 5,057 sales in the GTA in August, down 2.1% year over year
• Average selling price $993,410, down 2.7% year over year
• 12,075 new listings, down 14.1% year over year
• 24,482 total active listings at month end

TRREB itself points to a broader source of hesitation than price alone: uncertainty tied to the trade dispute with the United States. "The main holdup for many households has been concerns around trade with the United States and the potential for higher inflation and borrowing costs," the board said, even as recent economic and employment data have been comparatively positive.

"Average Price" and "Benchmark Price" Are Not the Same Number

Two figures came out of the same August release, and they are often quoted as if they are interchangeable. They aren't. The average selling price ($993,410) is a straight arithmetic mean of every sale that closed — a handful of very high-value transactions can pull it upward or downward on their own. The composite benchmark price, TRREB's own measure of a "typical" home adjusted for the mix of what actually sold, fell further: independent analysis of the same TRREB release by Better Dwelling put the benchmark at $925,900, down 4.5% year over year and 27.7% below the March 2022 peak.

By Better Dwelling's count, the region hasn't carried this much unsold inventory in August since 2008, eighteen years ago, and the sales-to-new-listings ratio sat at 37.5% — a level real estate economists generally treat as buyer's-market territory, where further price softening is the expected direction rather than the exception.

What the Same Season Looks Like Outside Toronto

The GTA number gets the headlines, but it isn't the only Ontario market, and it isn't necessarily the most useful one if you aren't buying in Toronto. The most recent published figures for Waterloo Region and London, both for July 2026 via the Canadian Real Estate Association's local board statistics, show declines of their own — in some respects sharper than the GTA's.

• Waterloo Region (Cornerstone Association of REALTORS®): Kitchener's benchmark price was $633,300, down 5.5% year over year; Cambridge's was $662,100, down 6.3%. Sales were down 10.0% year over year, with 3.9 months of supply on the market against a ten-year average of 1.92 months — roughly double the norm.
• London (London and St. Thomas Association of REALTORS®): the average price was $603,006, with sales down 4.9% year over year and 4.9 months of inventory on hand.

The mechanism is the same one at work in the GTA — more listings sitting on the market relative to the pace of sales — but Waterloo Region's months-of-supply figure, at roughly double its own ten-year norm, describes a market that has shifted further from balanced than the GTA's headline numbers alone suggest. If you're buying in Kitchener, Cambridge or the surrounding townships, or in London and Middlesex, the local numbers are the ones that should shape your expectations at the negotiating table, not the Toronto figure making the news.

What a Softer Market Changes, and What It Doesn't

More listings relative to sales generally means more room to negotiate on price, closing date and conditions — a home inspection condition or a longer closing is easier to ask for when a seller has fewer competing offers. A lower purchase price can also work in your favour at the numbers stage: your minimum down payment, and the size of the mortgage a lender needs to approve, both scale with the price you're actually paying.

What a softer market does not change is the qualifying math itself. Every insured and most uninsured mortgages in Canada are still stress-tested against a qualifying figure well above what you'll actually pay, and your income, debt load and credit profile are assessed the same way in a buyer's market as in a seller's one. A cheaper home can make that test easier to clear; it doesn't remove the test.

Should You Wait for Prices to Fall Further?

It's a reasonable question in a market that's been softening for months, and there's no honest single answer to it. RBC Economics' own mid-year outlook — covered in more detail in our piece on its Ontario forecast — expects 2026 to finish down for the country as a whole before a modest recovery begins in 2027, driven in its view by pent-up demand from buyers who have been sitting out the market since 2019.

When you look at the combination of housing prices and mortgage financing costs, it's actually in many cases more affordable to buy now than it was when borrowing was ultra low, just because the housing prices have come down so much.— Cailey Heaps, president, Heaps Estrin Real Estate Team, via The Canadian Press

Waiting for a lower price and waiting for cheaper financing are two different bets, and they don't necessarily arrive together. The honest version of "should I wait" usually isn't about the market at all — it's about your own timeline, how stable your income and down payment savings are right now, and whether a specific home meets what you actually need today. That's a conversation worth having against your own numbers, not a headline.