Canadian home sales rose again in October as lower borrowing costs and years of pent-up demand helped lift activity, even as pricing trends remained uneven across major cities. Tight supply and shifting buyer preferences, including concerns about small condos without parking, continued to shape the market.
BNN Bloomberg spoke with Philip Soper, CEO of Royal LePage, about buyer behaviour, demographic trends and how affordability pressures and urban living patterns are influencing the 2026 outlook.
Key Takeaways
- Lower borrowing costs and pent-up demand are helping lift national housing activity late in 2025.
- Price softness remains concentrated in Toronto and Vancouver, especially in small investor-focused condos.
- Condos without parking have become difficult to sell as buyers prioritize flexibility and transportation options.
- Millennials, now in their 30s and 40s, are driving demand but still face affordability barriers.
- Urban living pressures and smaller homes are contributing to delayed family formation in major cities.
Read the full transcript below:
ANDREW: There was something of a recovery in the housing market in October. National home sales climbed almost one per cent from September. The benchmark price of a home was up one-fifth of a per cent on a seasonally adjusted basis, and the number of new listings declined. Let’s get more from Philip Soper, CEO of Royal LePage. Philip, thanks very much indeed for joining us.
PHILIP: My pleasure.
ANDREW: The Real Estate Association reckons there is a slow recovery in place fuelled by lower borrowing costs. Would you agree with that?
PHILIP: Yeah, I’d say lower borrowing costs and three years of pent-up demand. It’s been a while since the pandemic boom, and people are having babies, getting new jobs, looking for new housing. But for many of them, they have delayed making those big decisions.
ANDREW: The benchmark price, though, still down three per cent year over year and way down from its peak of more than two years ago — well, substantially down, let’s say, from its peak of more than two years ago.
PHILIP: And that is pulled by certain classes of properties in certain cities. For most places in the country, home prices have been treading water for, well, a few years now.
ANDREW: That’s interesting. You’re talking in particular, I guess, about Toronto and Vancouver. I mean, especially for condos, for example — they’ve seen serious weakness.
PHILIP: Exactly. If you were to look at home prices in a city like Montreal or Halifax or Edmonton or moderate-priced cities, home prices actually haven’t gone very much up, but they’ve inched up the same way they’re inching down in broad major metropolitan areas like Toronto and Vancouver. And then we have those special asset classes like the investor-friendly Toronto condo. They really got hammered under the very high inflation and high interest rates post-pandemic, and the cutback in temporary foreign workers and foreign students.
ANDREW: It’s interesting how difficult it seems to be in places like Ontario to increase the supply of housing, one problem being that a lot of the speculators who bought properties to rent them have come out of the market. Demand has collapsed around Toronto for condos, for example.
PHILIP: Yeah, and you know, “speculators” — it’s a broad term. Actually, there is a relatively small slice of buyers in the market who are what we call flippers. We don’t like flippers. They try to buy low and sell high. Of course, they’ve been out of business since the pandemic because there hasn’t been enough activity in the market, enough movement in prices, to make a flipper’s world work. But if you’re speculating in terms of buying a condominium as an alternative to an RRSP and holding it and becoming a landlord for a number of years, that’s been a tough market. The math has been hard to make work.
ANDREW: And it sounds like we’ve got, let’s face it, substandard housing in Toronto. I’m talking about tiny apartments that people don’t want to live in.
PHILIP: Yeah, you know what we’re finding is selling in the condominium sector are condominiums with parking. And you think, “Well, don’t most condominiums come with parking?” Well, yeah, if you live outside of downtown Toronto or potentially Vancouver. But for a period of time over the last 15 years, that was a really popular form of condominium. And we’re just not Manhattan, and people do still work partially in the office, partially out of the office, despite back-to-office mandates. Which means they want transportation to get out of the city when they’re not living and working downtown. So yeah, we’ve got a mixed problem in our biggest city.
ANDREW: That’s interesting. Just give us that again, for example, in Toronto — I apologize to viewers for being a bit Toronto-centric here — but condos that don’t have parking are proving a tough sell.
PHILIP: Yes, condos — and those tend to be small condos too — but the real gotcha is no place to park a car. Which means you’re a true urbanite, and we obviously have those who don’t use a car, don’t need a car, never leave the downtown core. If they do, they rent a car or share a car. But for the majority of people buying homes now — remember our biggest cohort demographically is millennials, even bigger than the baby boomers — and they aren’t kids anymore. We’ve got 45-year-old millennials. So they want a car, and they can afford one. They just need a place to park it.
ANDREW: It’s interesting. Just finally, we know we’ve got slow population growth in many countries. That’s why in Canada we bring in immigrants. I’ve seen some research suggesting that the fact people can’t get a reasonably sized place to live is discouraging them from having kids.
PHILIP: Oh, absolutely. Urbanization is one of the major drivers of low birth rates. People who live in urban areas have access to alternatives, and people who live in non-rural areas tend to stay in school longer. I’m speaking specifically about women. They have their kids later. I think it’s about eight years over two generations — the first kid is now early 30s. It used to be, call it 24 years old when baby boomers were having kids. Now it’s about 32. So yeah, fewer children, and a lot of that relates to where they live.
ANDREW: We’d better leave it there. Phil, thank you very much indeed for joining us this morning.
PHILIP: My pleasure.
ANDREW: Phil Soper, CEO at Royal LePage.
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This BNN Bloomberg summary and transcript of the Nov. 17, 2025 interview with Philip Soper are published with the assistance of AI. Original research, interview questions and added context was created by BNN Bloomberg journalists. An editor also reviewed this material before it was published to ensure its accuracy and adherence with BNN Bloomberg editorial policies and standards.
