Canada’s housing sector is showing signs of renewed activity after a sluggish start to the year. The improvement has prompted a more optimistic assessment of home prices for the remainder of 2026.
BNN Bloomberg spoke with Anne-Elise Cugliari-Allegritti, vice-president of research and communications at Royal LePage, about regional price trends, buyer confidence and mortgage renewals.
Key Takeaways
- Canadian home sales remained below last year’s levels during the first half of 2026, while prices were broadly flat.
- Toronto performed better than expected as prices recorded modest gains from January and housing activity continued into the summer.
- Vancouver is following a similar trend, although its recovery has lagged behind Toronto’s.
- The price gap between Canada’s most and least expensive regions is narrowing as affordability improves in Toronto and Vancouver.
- Most borrowers renewing ultra-low pandemic-era mortgages are expected to continue meeting their payments without being forced to sell.
Read the full transcript below:
ROGER: Royal LePage is raising its national housing price forecast for this year as stronger demand outpaces limited supply. The real estate firm expects the aggregate price of a home to increase by two per cent this year, maybe more depending on your region. For more perspective, I’m joined by Anne-Elise Cugliari-Allegritti, vice-president of research and communications at Royal LePage. Anne-Elise, thank you very much for joining us today.
ANNE-ELISE: Thank you for having me.
ROGER: Okay, is this—are we at a moment? Is this a turnaround? Where—we—where do we stand right now with the housing market?
ANNE-ELISE: If we look at the data itself, there’s not a lot of excitement. To be honest, we can see that prices are really quite flat. You know, a little up, a little down, depending on the region you’re looking at, and overall sales year to date are still lagging behind last year. But what’s really giving us hope for the rest of the year is that the markets where we expected would perform more poorly have started to show signs of life.
Specifically, in Toronto, we had originally expected our aggregate price to be much lower by the end of the year, and, in fact, we’ve seen a very modest uptick just ever since January. So, in the first half of the year, it’s performed a little better than expected, and we’ve already made up, you know, the original very conservative plus-one-per-cent forecast.
So that’s where that increase comes from. But what’s really interesting to note is that we saw that the spring market got off to quite a late start this year, and instead of sort of slowing down after school ended, we’ve seen a trickle-on effect where continued increased demand is moving on into June and July and could possibly make for an even better summer than expected.
ROGER: Okay, now you mentioned the Toronto area. What other areas may be seeing a bit of a bust, and which ones are seeing some boom?
ANNE-ELISE: The trend in Vancouver is looking quite similar. It’s lagging a little bit behind Toronto, but in speaking with our experts right across the country, we know that buyers are coming to the table, including first-time buyers who had really been sitting out the last six to 12 months.
They’re coming back to the market. They’re looking at houses. They’re attending open houses. They’re asking questions. We may not necessarily be seeing that translate into transactions just yet, but there’s a lot of positive momentum, which gives us the impression that consumer confidence is being regained, which is positive.
ROGER: All right, and the gap is shrinking between the, like, Toronto, Montreal—or Toronto, Vancouver—and it’s shrinking with other markets. How much closer are they?
ANNE-ELISE: Yeah, we’re seeing that where prices had really shot up during the pandemic, so specifically in southern Ontario and in B.C.’s Interior, we saw prices go up in the double digits, and we saw the same sort of happen on the other end. So declines were much sharper as well in 2022 and ’23 and have continued to do so since then.
Whereas markets that maybe were a little bit underpriced pre-pandemic kind of made up that difference, probably closing the gap and sort of coming back to where they should have been originally. And so the gap between our most expensive and our least expensive markets is shrinking.
This is offering, obviously, affordability to locals both in the Toronto and Vancouver markets, making it a little bit easier, a little bit more affordable to get into the market, and it’s also meaning that interprovincial migration is probably a little bit less of a consideration. Where buyers in really expensive markets may have been looking to more affordable regions, they may be considering staying more local, given that affordability is improving.
ROGER: I was just in Halifax, and some of the house prices there really surprised me. Okay, I want to talk about mortgage rate renewals for the last of those magnificent—what—negative one per cent? No, it wasn’t quite, but it was down 1.5, 1.99, I think people were telling me they’re getting after the pandemic. Those are ending now. What kind of an impact do you think that will have?
ANNE-ELISE: Yeah, I think, you know, we’ve sort of been waiting for that shoe to drop for the last couple of years. There was so much concern that as people who locked into those ultra-low mortgage rates from 2020 and 2021 were going to just really end up in a—in a terrible financial situation when it came time to renew, and largely we have not seen that happen.
And I think that speaks volumes about the quality and the conservative nature of our Canadian lending practices. The mortgage stress test has a—has a huge role to play in that. We know that Canadian borrowers have to qualify at a significantly higher rate than what they end up paying on a monthly basis to ensure that they can withstand exactly these types of situations.
So the good news is that we’re nearing the end of the renewals of those ultra-low mortgages. It is widely expected that a majority of them will be able to renew their mortgages easily and continue to make those payments.
You know, of course, there’s always exceptions in situations where possibly, you know, there’s divorce in a family and you’re forced to sell a home or, you know, one of the—one of the income sources—you know, someone loses their job and, you know, you’ve refinanced your home. There’s going to be some situations where it’s more difficult, but for the most part, we expect that, you know, we’re not going to see a ton of—a ton of homes come on the market because people were not able to meet their mortgage obligations. That’s not the case.
ROGER: All right, we’re going to wrap it on that note. That wasn’t us turning lights down on you, but we do have to wrap it up there, Anne-Elise. Thanks, as always, for joining us.
ANNE-ELISE: My pleasure.
ROGER: Anne-Elise Cugliari-Allegritti, vice-president of research and communications at Royal LePage.
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This BNN Bloomberg summary and transcript of the July 14, 2026 interview with Anne-Elise Cugliari-Allegritti 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.
