Buyer's market without buyers: Vancouver sales slump as supply grows

Vancouver may be offering the most favourable conditions for homebuyers in years, but buyers still aren’t biting.

Home sales in the Vancouver region dropped to their lowest March level since 2019, even as inventory rose sharply across all housing types. According to the Greater Vancouver Realtors board, just 2,091 homes changed hands last month, marking a 13.4% decline from March 2024 and landing 36.8% below the region’s 10-year seasonal average.

The downturn comes even as new listings surged 29% year-over-year to 6,455, pushing total active listings to 14,546, up 37.9% from a year earlier and 15.8% above the seasonal norm.

“We’ve got almost a perfect buyers’ market kind of scenario but buyers are not really stepping in,” said Randy Ryalls, managing broker at Royal LePage Sterling Realty.

Heading into spring, many expected a stronger rebound. But Ryalls said geopolitical tensions have led potential buyers to hit pause.

“There’s still a fair bit of fence-sitting and that could be the 800-pound orange gorilla in the room,” Ryalls added.

“If you’re a buyer kind of looking at the marketplace and you’re seeing inventory growing and you’re seeing so much in the news cycle about these catastrophic economic things that could happen, I do think that it affects the general psychology a bit.

“Those things can sort of put people on the fence for a while and I think that’s what we’re seeing. I think people are sort of taking a little bit of a wait-and-see attitude right now.”

Despite rising inventory, prices have remained relatively stable. The composite benchmark price for a home in Vancouver stood at $1,190,900, down 0.6% year-over-year, but up 0.5% from February.

Andrew Lis, director of economics and data analytics for Greater Vancouver Realtors, noted that sellers appear ready to engage, but buyers haven’t followed suit.

“Buyers have not shown up in the numbers we typically see at this time of year,” he said in the report.

Lis added that despite political noise, the core housing conditions in Vancouver are arguably the most buyer-friendly in years.

“If we can set aside the political and economic uncertainty tied to the new US administration for a moment, buyers in Metro Vancouver haven’t seen market conditions this favourable in years,” he said in a press release.

“Prices have eased from recent highs, mortgage rates are among the lowest we’ve seen in years, and there are more active listings … than we’ve seen in almost a decade.”

The pullback was felt across all property types, but detached homes saw the steepest decline, with sales down 24.1% to 527 units. Apartment sales fell 10.2% to 1,084, and attached home sales dipped 4.6% to 472.

Similar patterns are beginning to show elsewhere. In Calgary, the city’s real estate board reported an 18.8% year-over-year drop in home sales for March, citing similar concerns around economic uncertainty and potential tariffs from the US.

“The threat of tariffs from south of the border” is casting a long shadow over Canada’s housing markets, the Calgary board noted.

CMP

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