Global Tariff Uncertainty Sidelines Buyers

“Up until this point, declining home sales have mostly been about tariff uncertainty. Going forward, the Canadian housing space will also have to contend with the actual economic fallout. In short order we’ve gone from a slam dunk rebound year to treading water at best,” said Shaun Cathcart, CREA’s Senior Economist.

While the largest of these declines has been seen in Ontario and British Columbia, sales have been down over the last few months in all but a handful of small markets across the country.

On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, the overall Canadian sales total for March 2025 fell 9.3% year-over-year and was the lowest for that month since 2009.

New supply moved up by 3% month-over-month in March. Combined with the decrease in sales, the national sales-to-new listings ratio fell to 45.9% compared to 49.7% in February. The March level for this measure of market balance is the lowest since February 2009. The long-term average for the national sales-to-new listings ratio is 54.9%, with readings between 45% and 65% generally consistent with balanced housing market conditions.

At the end of March 2025, 165,800 properties were listed for sale on all Canadian MLS® Systems, up 18.3% from a year earlier but still below the long-term average (around 174,000 listings) for this time of year.

“While the trend of falling monthly sales has been observed across Canada over the last few months, there are still many regions where sales are high, inventory is near record lows, and prices are rising,” said Valérie Paquin, newly installed Chair of CREA’s 2025-2026 Board of Directors. “There are also parts of the country with historically low sales and the highest inventory levels in a decade or more."

At the end of March 2025, there were 5.1 months of inventory nationwide, the highest level since the early months of the pandemic. The long-term average for this measure is five months of inventory. 

The National Composite MLS® Home Price Index (HPI) declined by 1% from February to March 2025, marking the largest month-over-month decrease since November 2023.

The renewed price softening was most notable in British Columbia and Ontario’s Greater Golden Horseshoe. Prices have continued to push higher across much of the Prairies, Quebec, and the East Coast.

The non-seasonally adjusted National Composite MLS® HPI was down 2.1% compared to March 2024.

The nonseasonally adjusted national average home price was $678,331 in March 2025, down 3.7% from March 2024.